Automatic Heuristic Construction in a Complete General Game Player

Abstract

Computer game players are typically designed to play a sin-gle game: today’s best chess-playing programs cannot play checkers, or even tic-tac-toe. General Game Playing is the problem of designing an agent capable of playing many dif-ferent previously unseen games. The first AAAI General Game Playing Competition was held at AAAI 2005 in or-der to promote research in this area. In this article, we survey some of the issues involved in creating a general game play-ing system and introduce our entry to that event. The main feature of our approach is a novel method for automatically constructing effective search heuristics based on the formal game description. Our agent is fully implemented and tested in a range of different games.