Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms for General Video Game Playing

Abstract

Game-playing evolutionary algorithms, specifically rolling horizon evolutionary algorithms (RHEA), have recently managed to beat the state of the art in win rate across many video games. However, the best results in a game are highly dependent on the specific configuration of modifications introduced over several papers, each adding additional parameters to the core algorithm. Furthermore, the best previously published parameters have been found from only a few human-picked combinations, as the possibility space has grown beyond exhaustive search. This article presents the state of the art in RHEA, combining all modifications described in the literature, as well as new ones. We then use a parameter optimizer, the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$</tex-math></inline-formula> -tuple bandit evolutionary algorithm, to find the best combination of parameters in 20 games from the general video game Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework. Furthermore, we analyze the algorithm’s parameters and some interesting combinations revealed through the optimization process. Finally, we find new state of the art solutions on several games by automatically exploring the large parameter space of RHEA.