Minibal: Balanced Game-Playing Without Opponent Modeling
This addresses the need for more engaging and educational human-AI interaction in games, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Minimax algorithms.
The paper tackled the problem of creating AI agents for balanced play in board games, where existing superhuman agents overwhelm human players, and introduced Minibal, a variant of Minimax designed for this purpose, achieving average outcomes close to perfect balance across seven games.
Recent advances in game AI, such as AlphaZero and Athénan, have achieved superhuman performance across a wide range of board games. While highly powerful, these agents are ill-suited for human-AI interaction, as they consistently overwhelm human players, offering little enjoyment and limited educational value. This paper addresses the problem of balanced play, in which an agent challenges its opponent without either dominating or conceding. We introduce Minibal (Minimize & Balance), a variant of Minimax specifically designed for balanced play. Building on this concept, we propose several modifications of the Unbounded Minimax algorithm explicitly aimed at discovering balanced strategies. Experiments conducted across seven board games demonstrate that one variant consistently achieves the most balanced play, with average outcomes close to perfect balance. These results establish Minibal as a promising foundation for designing AI agents that are both challenging and engaging, suitable for both entertainment and serious games.