Towards Human-Competitive Game Playing for Complex Board Games with Genetic Programming

International audienceRecent works have shown that Genetic Programming (GP) can be quite successful at evolving human-competitive strategies for games ranging from classic board games, such as chess, to action video games. However to our knowledge GP was never applied to modern complex board games, so-called eurogames, such as Settlers of Catan, i.e. board games that typically involve four characteristics: they are non zero-sum games, multiplayer, with hidden information and random elements. In this work we study how GP can evolve artificial players from low level attributes of a eurogame named " 7 Wonders " , that features all the characteristics of this category. We show that GP can evolve competitive artificial intelligence (AI) players against human-designed AI or against Monte Carlo Tree Search, a standard in automatic game playing