Indirect encoding of neural networks for scalable go

  • Authors:
  • Jason Gauci;Kenneth O. Stanley

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL;School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL

  • Venue:
  • PPSN'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Parallel problem solving from nature: Part I
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The game of Go has attracted much attention from the artificial intelligence community. A key feature of Go is that humans begin to learn on a small board, and then incrementally learn advanced strategies on larger boards. While some machine learning methods can also scale the board, they generally only focus on a subset of the board at one time. Neuroevolution algorithms particularly struggle with scalable Go because they are often directly encoded (i.e. a single gene maps to a single connection in the network). Thus this paper applies an indirect encoding to the problem of scalable Go that can evolve a solution to 5×5 Go and then extrapolate that solution to 7×7 Go and continue evolution. The scalable method is demonstrated to learn faster and ultimately discover better strategies than the same method trained on 7×7 Go directly from the start.