Planning and state evaluation in real-time decision domains

应用于游戏的人工智能（AI）研究有着悠久的传统，可以追溯到至少70年前艾伦·图灵（Alan Turing）在计算机国际象棋方面的工作。在这一领域研究AI算法的优势在于，游戏是精确定义的，与现实世界的决策领域相比相对较小，而且足够复杂，可以提出坚韧研究问题，其解决方案可以帮助我们创造人类智能的机器。人工智能研究在国际象棋、奥塞洛、西洋双陆棋和跳棋等游戏中取得了成功--在这些游戏中，机器的表现与最好的人类玩家不相上下，甚至更好。然而，巨大的挑战仍然存在-最明显的是在古老的亚洲棋盘游戏围棋，迄今为止没有机器可以与优秀的初学者相媲美。同样，视频游戏AI系统缺乏学习，规划和推理能力，导致与人类玩家相比性能较弱。 本课题的目标是通过抽象、前瞻搜索和搜索算法的机器学习来提高人工智能系统在实时决策领域的决策质量。我们的应用程序重点将放在流行的游戏中，初学者仍然优于最好的程序。这个项目的结果将增加我们对基本人工智能问题的理解，并将对一般的实时控制领域，特别是需要可靠的计算机控制代理的计算机游戏行业产生重大影响。

Artificial intelligence (AI) research applied to games has a long tradition thatreaches back at least 70 years with Alan Turing's work on computer chess. Theadvantage of studying AI algorithms in this area is that games are preciselydefined, relatively small when compared to real-world decision domains, and yetsufficiently complex to pose tough research problems whose solutions can help uscreating machines of human-level intelligence. AI research has had its successesin games like chess, Othello, backgammon, and checkers - where machines now playon par with or better than the best human players. However, big challenges remain- most notably in the ancient Asian board game of Go for which to date no machinecan match the strength of good beginners. Likewise, video game AI systems arelacking learning, planning, and reasoning capabilities which results in weakperformance compared to human players.  The objective of this project is to improve the decision quality of AI systemsin real-time decision domains by means of abstractions, look-ahead search, andmachine learning of search heuristics. Our application focus will be on populargames in which beginners still outperform the best programs. The results of thisproject will increase our understanding of fundamental AI problems and will haveconsiderable impact on the real-time control domain in general and the computergames industry in particular, which is in need of credible computer controlledagents.