Abstract:

Playing out the game from the current state to the end many times randomly, provides statistics that can be used for selecting the best move. This play-out analysis has proved to work well in games such as Backgammon, Bridge, and (miniature) Go. This paper introduces a method that selects relevant patterns of moves to collect higher order statistics. Play-out analysis avoids the horizon effect of regular game-tree search. The proposed method is especially effective when the game can be decomposed into a number of subgames. Preliminary experiments on the board games of Hex and Y are reported.

Higher order statistics in play-out analysis

Tapani Raiko