Abstract:
Poker Squares is a single-player card game played on a 5 x 5 grid, in which a player attempts to create as many high-scoring Poker hands as possible. As a stochastic single-player game with an extremely large state space, this game offers an interesting area of application for Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). This paper describes enhancements made to the MCTS algorithm to improve computer play, including pruning in the selection stage and a greedy simulation algorithm. These enhancements make extensive use of domain knowledge in the form of a state evaluation heuristic. Experimental results demonstrate both the general efficacy of these enhancements and their ideal parameter settings.
DOI:
10.1609/aaai.v30i1.9852