Modeling Precomputation In Games Played Under Computational Constraints

Modeling Precomputation In Games Played Under Computational Constraints

Thomas Orton

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2005-2011. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/276

Understanding the properties of games played under computational constraints remains challenging. For example, how do we expect rational (but computationally bounded) players to play games with a prohibitively large number of states, such as chess? This paper presents a novel model for the precomputation (preparing moves in advance) aspect of computationally constrained games. A fundamental trade-off is shown between randomness of play, and susceptibility to precomputation, suggesting that randomization is necessary in games with computational constraints. We present efficient algorithms for computing how susceptible a strategy is to precomputation, and computing an $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium of our model. Numerical experiments measuring the trade-off between randomness and precomputation are provided for Stockfish (a well-known chess playing algorithm).
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Complexity of Reasoning
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Resource Allocation
Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Meta-Reasoning and Meta-Heuristics