Knowledge-based Fast Evolutionary MCTS for General Video Game Playing

General Video Game Playing is a game AI domain in which the usage of game-dependent domain knowledge is very limited or even non existent. This imposes obvious difficulties when seeking to create agents able to play sets of different games. Taken more broadly, this issue can be used as an introduction to the field of General Artificial Intelligence. This paper explores the performance of a vanilla Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm, and analyzes the main difficulties encountered when tackling this kind of scenarios. Modifications are proposed to overcome these issues, strengthening the algorithm's ability to gather and discover knowledge, and taking advantage of past experiences. Results show that the performance of the algorithm is significantly improved, although there remain unresolved problems that require further research. The framework employed in this research is publicly available and will be used in the General Video Game Playing competition at the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games in 2014.