CMU-CS-03-107
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University



CMU-CS-03-107

William Uther, Manuela Veloso

January 2003

Note from Authors:
This manuscript was originally submitted for publication in April 1997.
Corrections were never completed and the paper was not published.
However, a copy was placed on the web and a number of people have referenced the work from there.
This technical report is now being published for ease of reference.
With the exception of the addition of a title page, the work is unmodified from the 1997 original.

CMU-CS-03-107.pdf


Keywords: Reinforcement learning, Markov games, adversarial reinforcement learning


Reinforcement Learning has been used for a number of years in single agent environments. This article reports on our investigation of Reinforcement Learning techniques in a multi-agent and adversarial environment with continuous observable state information. We introduce a new framework, two-player hexagonal grid soccer, in which to evaluate algorithms. We then compare the performance of several single-agent Reinforcement Learning techniques in that environment. These are further compared to a previously developed adversarial Reinforcement Learning algorithm designed for Markov games. Building upon these efforts, we introduce new algorithms to handle the multi-agent, the adversarial, and the continuous-valued aspects of the domain. We introduce a technique for modelling the opponent in an adversarial game. We introduce an extension to Prioritized Sweeping that allows generalization of learnt knowledge over neighboring states in the domain; and we introduce an extension to the U Tree generalizing algorithm that allows the handling of continuous state spaces. Extensive empirical evaluation is conducted in the grid soccer domain.

22 pages


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