Towards strategic Kriegspiel play with opponent modeling

• Authors: Antonio Del Giudice;Piotr Gmytrasiewicz;Josh Bryan
• Venue: Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
• Year: 2009

Kriegspiel is a chess variant belonging to the family of invisible chess that encompasses partially observable variants of the popular game. Playing Kriegspiel is difficult, first, because the player needs to maintain a belief over all possible board configurations. Second, the player needs to select his move, given his belief about the board configuration and given the likely responses of the opponent. Predicting the likely responses is crucial and has a long tradition in minimax approaches to fully observable games. Minimax assumes that the players are rational and have opposing preferences, which is common knowledge. Further, minimax is applicable only to fully observable games. In partially observable games one needs to model not only the opponent's preferences, but also the opponent's belief about the board configuration, and possibly his belief about the original player. Further, the opponent's level of expertise may also be in question in realistic settings.