Paper ID: 2111.02839

Optimised Playout Implementations for the Ludii General Game System

Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Cameron Browne

This paper describes three different optimised implementations of playouts, as commonly used by game-playing algorithms such as Monte-Carlo Tree Search. Each of the optimised implementations is applicable only to specific sets of games, based on their rules. The Ludii general game system can automatically infer, based on a game's description in its general game description language, whether any optimised implementations are applicable. An empirical evaluation demonstrates major speedups over a standard implementation, with a median result of running playouts 5.08 times as fast, over 145 different games in Ludii for which one of the optimised implementations is applicable.

Submitted: Nov 4, 2021