POMCP with Human Preferences in Settlers of Catan

Abstract

We present a suite of techniques for extending the Partially Observable Monte Carlo Planning algorithm to handle complex multi-agent games. We design the planning algorithm to exploit the inherent structure of the game. When game rules naturally cluster the actions into sets called types, these can be leveraged to extract characteristics and high-level strategies from a sparse corpus of human play. Another key insight is to account for action legality both when extracting policies from game play and when these are used to inform the forward sampling method. We evaluate our algorithm against other baselines and versus ablated versions of itself in the well-known board game Settlers of Catan.