1. Evolution of MiniMax Algorithm’s State Evaluation Heuristic for the Game of Abalone By Richard Wilson Dec 1, 2003

2. Main Topics What is Abalone? What are you evolving? How did you do this? Representation, Mutation, Reproduction Fitness The Next Step

3. Abalone Board game in the vein of chess & checkers Ranked "Game of the decade" in 1998 For ages 7 to 70 WS2003 - CS347 – class project An Indirect Source of much frustration for ws2003

4. An Abalone Board

5. State Evaluation Heuristic Estimate of moves till game over

6. Implementation ES to evolve the heuristic Heuristic operators: –Number of pieces on the board –Relative arrangement –Pushable pieces –location

7. ES Board Matrix - Classical Genetic Algorithm ideas apply

8. More different ES Groupings, Endangered pieces, –Genetic Programming

9. BEAGLE http://www.gel.ulaval.ca/~beagle/ An extensible evolutionary programming environment.

10. Representation Mutation & Reproduction Board location value matrix Various other aspects –Groupings –Endangered pieces

11. Fitness evaluation Play the evolved candidate in a tournament. Tournaments follow WS03-CS347 Ab_Net guidelines. Type of tournament influences EA

12. The Next Step Evolution of predictive pruning techniques Other games ( next semesters cs347 competition )

13. Questions?