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Monte carlo tree search on perfect rectangle packing problem instances

Published: 08 July 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We explore the possibilities of Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), immensely successful in games such as Go and Chess, to solve the perfect rectangle packing problem. Experiments are done on two differently generated problem sets of 1,000 instances each, and we explore six different rollout numbers and two different action-selection strategies for MCTS. We compare the algorithm's performance to an exact depth-first algorithm equipped with efficient pruning techniques. By rating the number of solutions found against the total number of tiles placed, we define a 'computationally economic tradeoff'. Different rollout numbers and strategies lead to different results, both within and between the two problem sets. We discuss these results in context of other heuristic algorithms on this problem and closely related areas.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Interpretability of rectangle packing solutions with Monte Carlo tree searchJournal of Heuristics10.1007/s10732-024-09525-230:3-4(173-198)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
  • (2022)Which rectangle sets have perfect packings?Operations Research Perspectives10.1016/j.orp.2021.1002119(100211)Online publication date: 2022

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cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
July 2020
1982 pages
ISBN:9781450371278
DOI:10.1145/3377929
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 July 2020

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Author Tags

  1. MCTS
  2. monte carlo
  3. packing problem
  4. perfect
  5. rectangle
  6. tree search

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Interpretability of rectangle packing solutions with Monte Carlo tree searchJournal of Heuristics10.1007/s10732-024-09525-230:3-4(173-198)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
  • (2022)Which rectangle sets have perfect packings?Operations Research Perspectives10.1016/j.orp.2021.1002119(100211)Online publication date: 2022

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