Open Loop Search for General Video Game Playing

General Video Game Playing is a sub-field of Game Artificial Intelligence, where the goal is to find algorithms capable of playing many different real-time games, some of them unknown a priori. In this scenario, the presence of domain knowledge must be severely limited, or the algorithm will overfit to the training games and perform poorly on the unknown games of the test set. Research in this area has been of special interest in the last years, with emerging contests like the General Video Game AI (GVG-AI) Competition. This paper introduces three different open loop techniques for dealing with this problem. First, a simple directed depth first search algorithm is employed as a baseline. Then, a tree search algorithm with a multi-armed bandit based tree policy is presented, followed by a Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithm (RHEA) approach. In order to test these techniques, the games from the GVG-AI Competition framework are used as a benchmark, evaluation on a training set of 29 games, and submitting to the 10 unknown games at the competition website. Results show how the general game-independent heuristic proposed works well across all algorithms and games, and how the RHEA becomes the best evolutionary technique in the rankings of the test set.