Figure 5: The total number of playouts for both plain UCT
and ensemble UCT is 2
17
= 131072. The percentage of
wins for ensemble UCT is reported. The value of C
p
for
plain UCT is always 1.0 when playing against Ensemble
UCT. To the left few large UCT trees, to the right many
small UCT trees.
Figure 6: The total number of playouts for both plain UCT
and ensemble UCT is 2
18
= 262144. The percentage of
wins for ensemble UCT is reported. The value of C
p
for
plain UCT is always 1.0 when playing against Ensemble
UCT. To the left few large UCT trees, to the right many
small UCT trees.
most algorithms, parallelizations suffer because parts
of the tree are searched with less information than is
available in the sequential search, causing more nodes
to be expanded. This study has shown how the re-
markable situation in which the parallel search tree is
smaller than the sequential search tree can indeed oc-
cur in MCTS. The ensemble of the independent (par-
allel) sub-trees can be smaller than the monolithic to-
tal tree. When C
p
is chosen low (i.e., exploitative)
the Ensemble search runs efficiently, where the mono-
lithic plain UCT search is less efficient (see Figures 5
and 6).
For future work, we will explore other parts of the
parameter space, to find optimal C
p
settings for dif-
ferent combinations of tree size and ensemble size.
Also, we will study the effect in different domains.
Even more important will be the study on the effect
of C
p
in tree parallelism (Chaslot et al., 2008a).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported in part by the ERC Advanced
Grant no. 320651, “HEPGAME.”
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