Parallel UCT search on GPUs

Nicolas A. Barriga, Marius Stanescu, Michael Buro

Abstract: We propose two parallel UCT search (Upper Confidence bounds applied to Trees) algorithms that take advantage of modern GPU hardware. Experiments using the game of Ataxx are conducted, and the algorithm's speed and playing strength is compared to sequential UCT running on the CPU and Block Parallel UCT that runs its simulations on a GPU. Empirical results show that our proposed Multiblock Parallel algorithm outperforms other approaches and can take advantage of the GPU hardware without the added complexity of searching multiple trees.