An analysis of hall-of-fame strategies in competitive coevolutionary algorithms for self-learning in RTS games

Abstract

This paper explores the use of Hall-of-Fame (HoF) in the application of competitive coevolution for finding winning strategies in RobotWars, a two-player real time strategy (RTS) game developed in the University of Malaga for research purposes. The main goal is testing different approaches in order to implement the concept of HoF as part of the self learning mechanism in competitive coevolutionary algorithms. Five approaches were designed and tested, the difference between them being based on the implementation of HoF as a long or short-term memory mechanism. Specifically they differ on the police followed to keep the members in the champions' memory during an updating process which deletes the weakest individuals, in order to consider only the robust members in the evaluation phase. It is shown how strategies based on periodical update of the HoF set on the basis of quality and diversity provide globally better results. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.