{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/choosing-well-your-opponents-how-to-guide-the","title":"Choosing Well Your Opponents: How to Guide the Synthesis of Programmatic Strategies","arxiv_id":"2307.04893","date":"2023-07-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Rubens O. Moraes","David S. Aleixo","Lucas N. Ferreira","Levi H. S. Lelis"],"abstract":"This paper introduces Local Learner (2L), an algorithm for providing a set of reference strategies to guide the search for programmatic strategies in two-player zero-sum games. Previous learning algorithms, such as Iterated Best Response (IBR), Fictitious Play (FP), and Double-Oracle (DO), can be computationally expensive or miss important information for guiding search algorithms. 2L actively selects a set of reference strategies to improve the search signal. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of our approach while guiding a local search algorithm for synthesizing strategies in three games, including MicroRTS, a challenging real-time strategy game. Results show that 2L learns reference strategies that provide a stronger search signal than IBR, FP, and DO. We also simulate a tournament of MicroRTS, where a synthesizer using 2L outperformed the winners of the two latest MicroRTS competitions, which were programmatic strategies written by human programmers.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04893v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.04893v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"choosing-well-your-opponents-how-to-guide-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/rubensolv/locallearnerijcai","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2307.04893","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2307.04893","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}