A Comparative Study of Solvers in Amazons Endgames

摘要

The game of Amazons is a fairly young member of the class of territory-games. The best Amazons programs play now at a high level, but can still be defeated by humans expert of the game. Our focus here is on the solving of endgames, with the goal of improving the general playing level of Amazons programs. Our comparative study of four solvers, DFPN, WPNS, Alpha/Beta and Monte-Carlo Tree-Search, shows that usual game-playing methods used for Amazons, namely Alpha-Beta and Monte-Carlo Tree-Search, are best suited for this task. This result also emphasizes the need of an evaluation function for the game of Amazons.