Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24 (NIPS 2011)
Richard Gibson, Duane Szafron
Computing a good strategy in a large extensive form game often demands an extraordinary amount of computer memory, necessitating the use of abstraction to reduce the game size. Typically, strategies from abstract games perform better in the real game as the granularity of abstraction is increased. This paper investigates two techniques for stitching a base strategy in a coarse abstraction of the full game tree, to expert strategies in fine abstractions of smaller subtrees. We provide a general framework for creating static experts, an approach that generalizes some previous strategy stitching efforts. In addition, we show that static experts can create strong agents for both 2-player and 3-player Leduc and Limit Texas Hold'em poker, and that a specific class of static experts can be preferred among a number of alternatives. Furthermore, we describe a poker agent that used static experts and won the 3-player events of the 2010 Annual Computer Poker Competition.