Automatic Heuristic Construction for General Game Playing

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 21

Student Abstracts

Creating programs that can play games such as chess, checkers, and backgammon, at a high level has long been a challenge and benchmark for AI. While several game-playing systems developed in the past, such as Deep Blue, Chinook, and TD-gammon have demonstrated competitive play against human players, such systems are limited in that they play only one particular game and they must be supplied with large amounts of expert knowledge. General Game Playing is the more challenging problem of designing an agent capable of playing many different previously unseen games. The first AAAI General Game Playing Competition was held at 2005 AAAI meeting in Pittsburgh in order to promote research in this area. We were one of nine participants in that competition. We survey some of the issues involved in creating a general game playing system and introduce our entry to that event. The main feature of our approach is a novel method for automatically constructing effective search heuristics based on the formal game description. Our agent is fully implemented and tested in a range of different games.