02-12-2021, 03:08 PM
(02-12-2021, 02:14 PM)dale walton Wrote: As in several of my games, passing reduces the following move's options, and so can be used to force game termination, when the other player can no longer make gains. Passing is thus very asymmetric.
In this game, the effect of passing can take a few moves, with the result that the AI completely misses its power in concluding the games, passing over shorter solutions for longer combos.
-->> Is there a way to tell the AI not to ignore (or to actually prioritize) passing moves when a player is leading in score, and they lead to mobility losses for the other player, (unless they lead to score turnarounds?)
There's no easy way to tell the AI anything like that right now, no. If the AIs can search deep enough, they should be able to see that though and pass accordingly. With the default options (small board), I see that an AI like Alpha-Beta can search quite far ahead. Just ran a game between two Alpha-Betas with 1 second time per move and quite quickly one of them already proved a win about 15 or 16 moves ahead of time, and in the sequence that they subsequently played there were multiple passes. I also see UCT agents passing a few times. I don't personally know anything about the game though, so can't easily judge if those are intelligent passes or not...
Anyway, Alpha-Beta does not take advice in a form like "if this then take that action". It only takes advice in a form like "game states that look like this are bad, game states that look like that are good".
Biased MCTS can take advice in the form that recommends actions (or recommends not taking actions) based on the situation, but currently that only works with geometric patterns around the locations affected by moves. Since pass moves (or swap moves) don't have any location, we can't really provide any recommendations specifically for those moves in this form either. It's something I've been thinking of to improve though...