Search Policies in Multi-Player Games

J. A. M. Nijssen*, Mark H. M. Winands

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

In this article we investigate how three multi-player search policies, namely max(n), paranoid, and Best-Reply Search, can be embedded in the MCTS framework. The performance of these search policies is tested in four different deterministic multi-player games with perfect information by running self-play experiments. We show that MCTS with the max(n) search policy overall performs best. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-player variant of the MCTS-Solver. We propose three update rules for solving nodes in a multi-player MCTS tree. The experimental results show that the multi-player variant of the MCTS-Solver is a genuine improvement for MCTS in multi-player games.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3-21
Number of pages19
JournalICGA Journal
Volume36
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2013

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