activity
20192026
most citedEnhancements for Real-Time Monte-Carlo Tree Search in General Video Game Playing

43 citations · 99 across the 31 of their papers we have counts for

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29 papers · 1 filter

cs.AI2026

For How Long Should We Be Punching? Learning Action Duration in Fighting Games

Hoang Hai Nguyen, Kurt Driessens, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

Fighting games such as Street Fighter II present unique challenges to reinforcement learning (RL) agents due to their fast-paced, real-time nature. In most RL frameworks, agents ar…

cs.AI2026

StratFormer: Adaptive Opponent Modeling and Exploitation in Imperfect-Information Games

Andy Caen, Mark H. M. Winands, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

We present StratFormer, a transformer-based meta-agent that learns to simultaneously model and exploit opponents in imperfect-information games through a two-phase curriculum. The…

cs.AI2025

Generalized Proof-Number Monte-Carlo Tree Search

Jakub Kowalski, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Szymon Kosakowski +1

This paper presents Generalized Proof-Number Monte-Carlo Tree Search: a generalization of recently proposed combinations of Proof-Number Search (PNS) with Monte-Carlo Tree Search (…

cs.AI2025

Ludax: A GPU-Accelerated Domain Specific Language for Board Games

Graham Todd, Alexander G. Padula, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers +1

Games have long been used as benchmarks and testing environments for research in artificial intelligence. A key step in supporting this research was the development of game descrip…

cs.AI2024

A Research Agenda for Usability and Generalisation in Reinforcement Learning

Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Spyridon Samothrakis, Kurt Driessens +1

It is common practice in reinforcement learning (RL) research to train and deploy agents in bespoke simulators, typically implemented by engineers directly in general-purpose progr…

cs.AI2024★ 43 cited

Enhancements for Real-Time Monte-Carlo Tree Search in General Video Game Playing

Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Chiara F. Sironi, Torsten Schuster +1

General Video Game Playing (GVGP) is a field of Artificial Intelligence where agents play a variety of real-time video games that are unknown in advance. This limits the use of dom…

cs.AI2024

GAVEL: Generating Games Via Evolution and Language Models

Graham Todd, Alexander Padula, Matthew Stephenson +3

Automatically generating novel and interesting games is a complex task. Challenges include representing game rules in a computationally workable form, searching through the large s…

cs.AI2024

Games of Knightian Uncertainty as AGI testbeds

Spyridon Samothrakis, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Damian Machlanski

Arguably, for the latter part of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, games have been seen as the drosophila of AI. Games are a set of exciting testbeds, whose solutions (in ter…

cs.AI2024

Towards a Characterisation of Monte-Carlo Tree Search Performance in Different Games

Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Guillaume Bams, Max Persoon +5

Many enhancements to Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) have been proposed over almost two decades of general game playing and other artificial intelligence research. However, our abil…

cs.AI2023

Proof Number Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search

Jakub Kowalski, Elliot Doe, Mark H. M. Winands +2

This paper proposes a new game-search algorithm, PN-MCTS, which combines Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and Proof-Number Search (PNS). These two algorithms have been successfully a…

cs.AI2023

Measuring Board Game Distance

Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Éric Piette +1

This paper presents a general approach for measuring distances between board games within the Ludii general game system. These distances are calculated using a previously published…

cs.AI2022★ 1 cited

Combining Monte-Carlo Tree Search with Proof-Number Search

Elliot Doe, Mark H. M. Winands, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers +1

Proof-Number Search (PNS) and Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) have been successfully applied for decision making in a range of games. This paper proposes a new approach called PN-MC…

cs.AI2022★ 1 cited

The Ludii Game Description Language is Universal

Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson +1

There are several different game description languages (GDLs), each intended to allow wide ranges of arbitrary games (i.e., general games) to be described in a single higher-level…

cs.AI2022

Spatial State-Action Features for General Games

Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson +1

In many board games and other abstract games, patterns have been used as features that can guide automated game-playing agents. Such patterns or features often represent particular…

cs.AI2021

General Board Geometry

Cameron Browne, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson +1

Game boards are described in the Ludii general game system by their underlying graphs, based on tiling, shape and graph operators, with the automatic detection of important propert…

cs.AI2021

Optimised Playout Implementations for the Ludii General Game System

Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson +1

This paper describes three different optimised implementations of playouts, as commonly used by game-playing algorithms such as Monte-Carlo Tree Search. Each of the optimised imple…

cs.AI2021

Automatic Generation of Board Game Manuals

Matthew Stephenson, Eric Piette, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers +1

In this paper we present a process for automatically generating manuals for board games within the Ludii general game system. This process requires many different sub-tasks to be a…

cs.AI2021

General Board Game Concepts

Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers +1

Many games often share common ideas or aspects between them, such as their rules, controls, or playing area. However, in the context of General Game Playing (GGP) for board games,…

cs.AI2021

General Game Heuristic Prediction Based on Ludeme Descriptions

Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Eric Piette +1

This paper investigates the performance of different general-game-playing heuristics for games in the Ludii general game system. Based on these results, we train several regression…

cs.AI2021

Deep Learning for General Game Playing with Ludii and Polygames

Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Vegard Mella, Cameron Browne +1

Combinations of Monte-Carlo tree search and Deep Neural Networks, trained through self-play, have produced state-of-the-art results for automated game-playing in many board games.…

cs.AI2021★ 10 cited

Strategic Features for General Games

Cameron Browne, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Eric Piette

This short paper describes an ongoing research project that requires the automated self-play learning and evaluation of a large number of board games in digital form. We describe t…

cs.AI2021★ 3 cited

Ludii Game Logic Guide

Éric Piette, Cameron Browne, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

This technical report outlines the fundamental workings of the game logic behind Ludii, a general game system, that can be used to play a wide variety of games. Ludii is a program…

cs.AI2019

Ludii as a Competition Platform

Matthew Stephenson, Éric Piette, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers +1

Ludii is a general game system being developed as part of the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project (DLP). While its primary aim is to model, play, and analyse the full range of tradit…

cs.AI2019

Ludii and XCSP: Playing and Solving Logic Puzzles

Cédric Piette, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson +2

Many of the famous single-player games, commonly called puzzles, can be shown to be NP-Complete. Indeed, this class of complexity contains hundreds of puzzles, since people particu…