Games, including abstract board games, constitute a convenient ground to
create, design, and improve new AI methods. In this field, Monte Carlo Tree
Search is a popular algorithm family, aiming to build game trees and explore
them efficiently. Combinatorial Optimization, on the other hand, aims to model
and solve problems with an objective to optimize and constraints to satisfy,
and is less common in Game AI. We believe however that both methods can be
combined efficiently, by injecting Combinatorial Optimization into Monte Carlo
Tree Search to help the tree search, leading to a novel combination of these
two techniques. Tested on the board game boop., our method beats 96% of the
time the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm baseline. We conducted an ablation
study to isolate and analyze which injections and combinations of injections
lead to such performances. Finally, we opposed our AI method against human
players on the Board Game Arena platform, and reached a 373 ELO rating after 51
boop. games, with a 69% win rate and finishing ranked 56th worldwide on the
platform over 5,316 boop. players.

通过将组合优化注入蒙特卡罗树搜索，我们在抽象棋盘游戏中提出了一种新的 AI 方法，该方法在对强化学习算法的基线进行测试时的胜率达到 96％，并在 Board Game Arena 平台上与人类玩家对抗时取得了良好的成绩。

将组合优化引入 MCTS 方法：应用于棋盘游戏 boop

Injecting Combinatorial Optimization into MCTS: Application to the Board  Game boop

This paper introduces ZeusAI, an artificial intelligence system developed to
play the board game 7 Wonders Duel. Inspired by the AlphaZero reinforcement
learning algorithm, ZeusAI relies on a combination of Monte Carlo Tree Search
and a Transformer Neural Network to learn the game without human supervision.
ZeusAI competes at the level of top human players, develops both known and
novel strategies, and allows us to test rule variants to improve the game's
balance. This work demonstrates how AI can help in understanding and enhancing
board games.

ZeusAI 是一种人工智能系统，通过结合 Monte Carlo Tree Search 和 Transformer 神经网络来学习 7 Wonders Duel 棋盘游戏，无需人类监督。它能够与顶级人类玩家竞争，发展已知和新颖的策略，并通过测试规则变体来提高游戏的平衡性。这项工作展示了人工智能在理解和提升棋盘游戏方面的作用。