Strength Estimation and Human-Like Strength Adjustment in Games

Published: 22 Jan 2025, Last Modified: 31 Mar 2025ICLR 2025 PosterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Bradley-Terry Model, Strength Estimation, Strength Adjustment, Human-like Playing Style, Monte-Carlo Tree Search, Go, Chess
TL;DR: This paper proposes a strength system that can estimate the strength from games and provide various playing strengths while simultaneously offer a human-like behavior in both Go and chess.
Abstract: Strength estimation and adjustment are crucial in designing human-AI interactions, particularly in games where AI surpasses human players. This paper introduces a novel strength system, including a *strength estimator* (SE) and an SE-based Monte Carlo tree search, denoted as *SE-MCTS*, which predicts strengths from games and offers different playing strengths with human styles. The strength estimator calculates strength scores and predicts ranks from games without direct human interaction. SE-MCTS utilizes the strength scores in a Monte Carlo tree search to adjust playing strength and style. We first conduct experiments in Go, a challenging board game with a wide range of ranks. Our strength estimator significantly achieves over 80% accuracy in predicting ranks by observing 15 games only, whereas the previous method reached 49% accuracy for 100 games. For strength adjustment, SE-MCTS successfully adjusts to designated ranks while achieving a 51.33% accuracy in aligning to human actions, outperforming a previous state-of-the-art, with only 42.56% accuracy. To demonstrate the generality of our strength system, we further apply SE and SE-MCTS to chess and obtain consistent results. These results show a promising approach to strength estimation and adjustment, enhancing human-AI interactions in games. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/strength-estimator.
Primary Area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
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Submission Number: 9280
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