Hyper-heuristic general video game playing

Abstract

In general video game playing, the challenge is to create agents that play unseen games proficiently. Stochastic tree search algorithms, like Monte Carlo Tree Search, perform relatively well on this task. However, performance is non-transitive: different agents perform best in different games, which means that there is not a single agent that is the best in all the games. Rather, some types of games are dominated by a few agents whereas other different agents dominate other types of games. Thus, it should be possible to construct a hyper-agent that selects from a portfolio, in which constituent sub-agents will play a new game best. Since there is no knowledge about the games, the agent needs to use available features to predict the most suitable algorithm. This work constructs such a hyper-agent using the General Video Game Playing Framework (GVGAI). The proposed method achieves promising results that show the applicability of hyper-heuristics in general video game playing and related tasks.