Alpha-Mini: Minichess Agent with Deep Reinforcement Learning

12/22/2021

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by   Michael Sun, et al.

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We train an agent to compete in the game of Gardner minichess, a downsized variation of chess played on a 5x5 board. We motivated and applied a SOTA actor-critic method Proximal Policy Optimization with Generalized Advantage Estimation. Our initial task centered around training the agent against a random agent. Once we obtained reasonable performance, we then adopted a version of iterative policy improvement adopted by AlphaGo to pit the agent against increasingly stronger versions of itself, and evaluate the resulting performance gain. The final agent achieves a near (.97) perfect win rate against a random agent. We also explore the effects of pretraining the network using a collection of positions obtained via self-play.