Mixing search strategies for multi-player games
Inon Zuckerman, Ariel Felner, Sarit Kraus · 2009
There are two basic approaches to generalize the propagation mechanism of the two-player Minimax search algorithm to multi-player (3 or more) games: the MaxN algorithm and the Paranoid algorithm. The main shortcoming of these approaches is that their strategy is fixed. In this paper we suggest a new approach (called MP-Mix) that dynamically changes the propagation strategy based on the players ’ relative strengths between MaxN, Paranoid and a newly presented offensive strategy. In addition, we introduce the Opponent Impact factor for multi-player games, which measures the players ’ ability to impact their opponents ’ score, and show its relation to the relative performance of our new MP-Mix strategy. Experimental results show that MP-Mix outperforms all other approaches under most circumstances. 1