Methods of MCTS and the game Arimaa
Tomáš Kozelek · Digital Repository (National Repository of Grey Literature) · 2009
Game of Arimaa is an artificially created strategic board game with the purpose to be difficult for computers. A vast majority of introduced computer engines for Arimaa are based on successful approaches from chess, namely the minimax algorithm with pruning and further extensions. In this thesis we have analyzed the applicability of the so called MCTS methods in the game of Arimaa. MCTS methods are a state-of-the-art approach to the computer Go with bright prospects in other strategic games as well. We have implemented a MCTS based Arimaa engine called Akimot and adapted the MCTS techniques for the Arimaa environment. We have experimented with various MCTS enhancements known from computer Go and identified which are prospective in our setup. Moreover, we have proposed several new enhancements on ourselves. Performance experiments show that our MCTS approach is comparable to an average engine.