Nested-greedy search for adversarial real-time games

Abstract

Churchill and Buro (2013) launched a line of research through Portfolio Greedy Search (PGS), an algorithm for adversarial real-time planning that uses scripts to simplify the problem’s action space. In this paper we present a problem in PGS’s search scheme that has hitherto been overlooked. Namely, even under the strong assumption that PGS is able to evaluate all actions available to the player, PGS might fail to return the best action. We then describe an idealized algorithm that is guaranteed to return the best action and present an approximation of such algorithm, which we call Nested-Greedy Search (NGS). Empirical results on µRTS show that NGS is able to outperform PGS as well as state-of-the-art methods in matches played in small to medium-sized maps.