Heuristics in MCTS-based Computer Go : Can heuristics improve the performance of MCTS-based computer go?

Sammanfattning: The subject of computer Go is an active eld under AI and has achieved much attention in research. The current state of the art computer Go im-plementations uses a game tree search approach rather than advanced heuristics. This thesis aims to bridge these two approaches and combineMonte Carlo Tree Search with heuristics to deduce if any general results can be found. The results of the thesis indicate that the performance of a combined MCTS-heuristic approach correlates strongly with performance of the heuristic. Furthermore, MCTS can be used with any heuristic to improve its performance.1