Heuristic move pruning in Monte Carlo Tree Search for the strategic card game Lords of War
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Sephton, Nick; Cowling, Peter I.; Powley, Edward; Slaven, Nicholas H.
- Source
- 2014 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), 2014 IEEE Conference on. :1-7 Aug, 2014
- Subject
- Computing and Processing
General Topics for Engineers
Robotics and Control Systems
Games
Heating
Engines
Estimation
Layout
- Language
- ISSN
- 2325-4270
2325-4289
Move pruning is a technique used in game tree search which incorporates heuristic knowledge to reduce the number of moves under consideration from a particular game state. This paper investigates Heuristic Move Pruning on the strategic card game Lords of War. We use heuristics to guide our pruning and experiment with different techniques of applying pruning and their relative effectiveness. We also present a technique of artificially rolling forward a game state in an attempt to more accurately determine which moves are appropriate to prune from the decision tree. We demonstrate that heuristic move pruning is effective in Lords of War, and also that artificially rolling forward the game state can increase the effectiveness of heuristic move pruning.