Skip to main content

Efficient Heuristic Policy Optimisation for a Challenging Strategic Card Game

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2020)

Abstract

Turn-based multi-action adversarial games are challenging scenarios in which each player turn consists of a sequence of atomic actions. The order in which an AI agent runs these atomic actions may hugely impact the outcome of the turn. One of the main challenges of game artificial intelligence is to design a heuristic function to help agents to select the optimal turn to play, given a particular state of the game. In this paper, we report results using the recently developed N-Tuple Bandit Evolutionary Algorithm to tune the heuristic function parameters. For evaluation, we measure how the tuned heuristic function affects the performance of the state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithm Online Evolution Planning. The multi-action adversarial strategy card game Legends of Code and Magic was used as a testbed. Results indicate that the N-Tuple Bandit Evolutionary Algorithm can effectively tune the heuristic function parameters to improve the performance of the agent.

This work has been partially supported by the grant CAS18/00207 from the Spanish Ministry of Education, culture and sports.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://playhearthstone.com.

References

  1. Baier, H., Cowling, P.I.: Evolutionary MCTS for multi-action adversarial games. In: Preceedings of the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG 2018 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2018.8490403

  2. Bursztein, E.: I am a legend: hacking hearthstone using statistical learning methods. In: 2016 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) (2016). https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2016.7860416

  3. Choe, J.S.B., Kim, J.K.: Enhancing Monte Carlo tree search for playing hearthstone. In: Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Games, GOG 2019 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Cowling, P., Powley, E., Whitehouse, D.: Information set Monte Carlo tree search. IEEE Trans. Comput. Intell. AI Games 4, 120–143 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1109/TCIAIG.2012.2200894

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Dockhorn, A., Frick, M., Akkaya, Ü., Kruse, R.: Predicting opponent moves for improving hearthstone AI. In: Medina, J., et al. (eds.) IPMU 2018. CCIS, vol. 854, pp. 621–632. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91476-3_51

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Justesen, N., Mahlmann, T., Togelius, J.: Online evolution for multi-action adversarial games. In: Squillero, G., Burelli, P. (eds.) EvoApplications 2016. LNCS, vol. 9597, pp. 590–603. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31204-0_38

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Kowalski, J., Miernik, R.: Legends of code and magic (2019). https://jakubkowalski.tech/Projects/LOCM/. Accessed 26 May 2019

  8. Lucas, S.M., et al.: Efficient evolutionary methods for game agent optimisation: model-based is best. In: AAAI Workshop on Games and Simulations for Artificial Intelligence (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Lucas, S.M., Liu, J., Perez-Liebana, D.: The n-tuple bandit evolutionary algorithm for game agent optimisation. In: Proceedings of IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, CEC 2018 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Myerson, R.: Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1997)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Perez Liebana, D., Samothrakis, S., Lucas, S., Rohlfshagen, P.: Rolling horizon evolution versus tree search for navigation in single-player real-time games. In: Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, GECCO 2013, pp. 351–358 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2463372.2463413

  12. Santos, A., Santos, P.A., Melo, F.S.: Monte Carlo tree search experiments in hearthstone. In: 2017 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG 2017, pp. 272–279 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Zhang, S., Buro, M.: Improving hearthstone AI by learning high-level rollout policies and bucketing chance node events. In: 2017 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG 2017, pp. 309–316 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank J. Kowalski for his help solving doubts about the LOCM rules and N. Justensen and H. Baier for their help in better understanding their algorithms.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Raúl Montoliu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Montoliu, R., Gaina, R.D., Pérez-Liebana, D., Delgado, D., Lucas, S. (2020). Efficient Heuristic Policy Optimisation for a Challenging Strategic Card Game. In: Castillo, P.A., Jiménez Laredo, J.L., Fernández de Vega, F. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12104. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43722-0_26

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43722-0_26

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-43721-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-43722-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics