Learning Game-Specific Spatially-Oriented Heuristics

This paper describes an architecture that begins with enough general knowledge to play any board game as a novice, and then shifts its decision-making emphasis to learned, game-specific, spatially-oriented heuristics. From its playing experience, it acquires game-specific knowledge about both patterns and spatial concepts. The latter are proceduralized as learned, spatially-oriented heuristics. These heuristics represent a new level of feature aggregation that effectively focuses the program's attention. While training against an external expert, the program integrates these heuristics robustly. After training it exhibits both a new emphasis on spatially-oriented play and the ability to respond to novel situations in a spatially-oriented manner. This significantly improves performance against a variety of opponents. In addition, we address the issue of context on pattern learning. The procedures described here move toward learning spatially-oriented heuristics for autonomous programs in other spatial domains.