Automatic Heuristic Construction in a Complete General Game Player

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 21

Special Track on Integrated Intelligent Capabilities

Computer game players are typically designed to play a single game: today's best chess-playing programs cannot play checkers, or even tic-tac-toe. General Game Playing is the problem of designing an agent capable of playing many different previously unseen games. The first AAAI General Game Playing Competition was held at AAAI 2005 in order to promote research in this area. In this article, 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.