Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) Workshop
Imperial College London, 180 Queens Gate, South Kensington, SW7 2RH
Room 345, Huxley Building
10am-5pm, August 4, 2010

MCTS: State of the Art
In the four years since the inception of MCTS we have seen remarkable progress in the demanding AI field of computer Go and in other domains. The aim of this workshop is to take stock of the current state of this rapidly developing research field: What have we learnt? What has been achieved? Where are we now and what is next?

Discussion topics at the workshop included the application of MCTS to video games, board games and real-time strategy games. MCTS is of interest to these fields for several reasons, including its potential to control general purpose agents who are able to act intelligently with a minimal degree of application-specific programming, and in procedural content generation and analysis. The schedule for the day is given below.

This workshop was free for Network members and the Network contributed towards travel expenses. Attendance: 28. Coordinator: Cameron Browne ([email protected]).

MCTS: State of the Art
Programme

10:00: SESSION 1 - Introduced by Simon Lucas (chair)
- Olivier Teytaud “State of the Art: What is MCTS, where is it now, and where is it going?” (pdf, 6.9 MB)
- Martin Mueller “Challenges in Monte Carlo Tree Search” (pdf, 2.8 MB)
- Ryan Hayward “MoHex: Computer Hex world champion” (pdf, .5 MB)

13:00: Lunch and chat.

14:00: SESSION 2 - Introduced by Peter Cowling (chair)
- Yngvi Bjornsson and Hilmar Finnsson “CadiaPlayer: MCTS in General Game Playing” (pdf, 1 MB)
- Arpad Rimmel “Havannah, Monte Carlo Enhancements and Linear Transforms” (pdf, .9 MB)
- Simon Lucas, Peter Cowling and Cameron Browne “MCTS for Games and Beyond: Upcoming EPSRC project” (pdf, 1.6 MB)

16:30: SESSION 3 - Panel / round table discussion.

18:30-: Dinner at the Med Kitchen restaurant (25 Gloucester Rd) for invited guests.