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arXiv · 1705.02955

Safe and Nested Subgame Solving for Imperfect-Information Games

Noam Brown·Tuomas Sandholm
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Abstract

In imperfect-information games, the optimal strategy in a subgame may depend on the strategy in other, unreached subgames. Thus a subgame cannot be solved in isolation and must instead consider the strategy for the entire game as a whole, unlike perfect-information games. Nevertheless, it is possible to first approximate a solution for the whole game and then improve it by solving individual subgames. This is referred to as subgame solving. We introduce subgame-solving techniques that outperform prior methods both in theory and practice. We also show how to adapt them, and past subgame-solving techniques, to respond to opponent actions that are outside the original action abstraction; this significantly outperforms the prior state-of-the-art approach, action translation. Finally, we show that subgame solving can be repeated as the game progresses down the game tree, leading to far lower exploitability. These techniques were a key component of Libratus, the first AI to defeat top humans in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em poker.

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Noam Brown, Tuomas Sandholm. 2017-11-16. Safe and Nested Subgame Solving for Imperfect-Information Games. https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.02955

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