Optimised Playout Implementations for the Ludii General Game System

TL;DR

This paper presents three optimized playout implementations for the Ludii game system, significantly accelerating game simulations by up to 5.08 times across various game types.

Contribution

It introduces game-specific optimized playout methods for Ludii, automatically selected based on game rules, enhancing simulation speed in general game playing.

Findings

Median speedup of 5.08x over standard implementation

Applied to 145 different games in Ludii

Demonstrates significant performance improvements

Abstract

This paper describes three different optimised implementations of playouts, as commonly used by game-playing algorithms such as Monte-Carlo Tree Search. Each of the optimised implementations is applicable only to specific sets of games, based on their rules. The Ludii general game system can automatically infer, based on a game's description in its general game description language, whether any optimised implementations are applicable. An empirical evaluation demonstrates major speedups over a standard implementation, with a median result of running playouts 5.08 times as fast, over 145 different games in Ludii for which one of the optimised implementations is applicable.