In plain words: A self-play game AI framework uses a network with no fixed-size layers, so one bot works on any board size, and trains against its own best saved versions to stay stable. It beat strong humans at 19x19 Hex and Havannah and won several competitions.
Abstract
Since DeepMind's AlphaZero, Zero learning quickly became the state-of-the-art method for many board games. It can be improved using a fully convolutional structure (no fully connected layer). Using such an architecture plus global pooling, we can create bots independent of the board size. The training can be made more robust by keeping track of the best checkpoints during the training and by training against them. Using these features, we release Polygames, our framework for Zero learning, with its library of games and its checkpoints. We won against strong humans at the game of Hex in 19x19, which was often said to be untractable for zero learning; and in Havannah. We also won several first places at the TAAI competitions.
Tristan Cazenave, Yen-Chi Chen, Guan-Wei Chen, Shi-Yu Chen, Xian-Dong Chiu, Julien Dehos, Maria Elsa, Qucheng Gong, Hengyuan Hu, Vasil Khalidov, Cheng-Ling Li, Hsin-I Lin, et al.
arXiv:2001.09832 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Jan 27, 2020
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