Learning Explainable Representations of Complex Game-playing Strategies

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning agents are capable of outperforming human experts at games like chess, Go and StarCraft II. These agents do not simply take advantage of their digital hardware in being able to react and calculate faster than humans, but employ better strategies that lead to more victories. Interpreting these strategies would give human players valuable insight into how to improve their play. In this preliminary work, we propose a symbolic sub-policy model for playing chess. Inspired by chess tactics, our model attempts to incorporate domain knowledge to improve interpretability. We adapt patterns learned by an inductive logic programming system called PAL to derive our model. We contribute a divergence metric to evaluate our model against a random baseline, and find a set of tactics that is able to suggest moves of similar playing strength to a human beginner. Finally, we propose a computational evaluation scheme for the model by augmenting an off-the-shelf engine with it.

This paper introduces a new paradigm for AI game programming, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to extend and operationalize Claude Shannon's taxonomy of game-playing machines. Central to this paradigm is Nemobot, an interactive agentic engineering environment that enables users to create, customize, and deploy LLM-powered game agents while actively engaging with AI-driven strategies. The LLM-based chatbot, integrated within Nemobot, demonstrates its capabilities across four distinct classes of games. For dictionary-based games, it compresses state-action mappings into efficient, generalized models for rapid adaptability. In rigorously solvable games, it employs mathematical reasoning to compute optimal strategies and generates human-readable explanations for its decisions. For heuristic-based games, it synthesizes strategies by combining insights from classical minimax algorithms (see, e.g., shannon1950chess) with crowd-sourced data. Finally, in learning-based games, it utilizes reinforcement learning with human feedback and self-critique to iteratively refine strategies through trial-and-error and imitation learning. Nemobot amplifies this framework by offering a programmable environment where users can experiment with tool-augmented generation and fine-tuning of strategic game agents. From strategic games to role-playing games, Nemobot demonstrates how AI agents can achieve a form of self-programming by integrating crowdsourced learning and human creativity to iteratively refine their own logic. This represents a step toward the long-term goal of self-programming AI.

Real-time strategy (RTS) games require agents to coordinate economic development, production and construction, base defense, unit organization, and attack timing over long matches. Existing studies have applied large language models to command decision-making in RTS games, enabling agents to read textual game states and generate high-level plans. However, long inference latency can cause them to miss critical tactical events. The complexity and tactical diversity of full RTS matches also leave existing systems heavily dependent on manually written experience-based prompts, with limited ability to learn continuously from past games. We present STRATA, a role-aligned hierarchical system with cross-game self-learning for Red Alert. STRATA assigns in-game strategic, logistical, and tactical decisions to a Strategic Agent (SA), Logistics Agent (LA), and Tactical Agent (TA), respectively. The SA generates high-level directives based on the global game state and relevant experience cards, while the LA and TA handle logistics and tactical execution. After each match, a Review Agent (RA) derives candidate experience from game traces, validates and revises it using evidence from subsequent matches, and compresses strategic experience supported across multiple games into concise experience cards for SA retrieval. We evaluate STRATA through the formation of experience cards, full-match comparisons before and after learning, and experience learning against AI opponents with different play styles. Under a fixed scenario, using the learned experience cards increases the observed win rate from 30% to 100%. Sequential learning against AI opponents with different play styles also produces distinct long-term strategic experience.