On Addressing the Challenges of Complex Stochastic Games Using “Representative” Moves

The problem of achieving competitive game play in a board game, against an intelligent opponent, is a well-known and studied field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This area of research has seen major breakthroughs in recent years, particularly in the game of Go. However, popular hobby board games, and particularly Trading Card Games, have unique qualities that make them very challenging to existing game playing techniques, partly due to enormous branching factors. This remains a largely unexamined domain and is the arena we operate in. To attempt to tackle some of these daunting requirements, we introduce the novel concept of “Representative” Moves (RMs). Rather than examine the complete l…