Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has become a popular solution for controlling non-player characters. Its use has repeatedly been shown to be capable of creating strong game playing opponents. However, the emergent playstyle of agents using MCTS is not necessarily human-like, believable or enjoyable. AI Factory Spades, currently the top rated Spades game in the Google Play store, uses a variant of MCTS to control non-player characters. In collaboration with the developers, we collected gameplay data from 27,592 games and showed in a previous study that the playstyle of human players significantly differed from that of the non-player characters. This paper presents a method of biasing MCTS using human gameplay data to create Spades playing agents that emulate human play whilst maintaining a strong, competitive performance. The methods of player modelling and biasing MCTS presented in this study are generally applicable to digital games with discrete actions.

To get an idea of why this was a common thought among researchers, it may be useful to understand how programs that play chess work (a game where machines have vastly surpassed humans), and then see why the same approach couldn't be used for the game of Go. In chess, a procedure known as minimax (along with several other clever tricks that help optimize it) is a common strategy to write programs that play the game (a.k.a. The most sophisticated of these programs use this approach at their core, including popular open source programs such as GNU Chess and Crafty. Minimax, which performs what is known in game theory as a "game tree search," can be explained in simple terms as a simulation of the game that takes into account all possible moves of one player and all counter moves of the opponent, until either the end of the game is reached or a certain prefixed number of moves has been simulated (more on this later). In essence, it's a way of simulating all possible futures of a game, and then figuring out, from the current position, which of the best futures can be forced by the player in turn to get the best possible outcome.

There are various parametric models for analyzing pairwise comparison data, including the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) and Thurstone models, but their reliance on strong parametric assumptions is limiting. In this work, we study a flexible model for pairwise comparisons, under which the probabilities of outcomes are required only to satisfy a natural form of stochastic transitivity. This class includes parametric models including the BTL and Thurstone models as special cases, but is considerably more general. We provide various examples of models in this broader stochastically transitive class for which classical parametric models provide poor fits. Despite this greater flexibility, we show that the matrix of probabilities can be estimated at the same rate as in standard parametric models. On the other hand, unlike in the BTL and Thurstone models, computing the minimax-optimal estimator in the stochastically transitive model is non-trivial, and we explore various computationally tractable alternatives. We show that a simple singular value thresholding algorithm is statistically consistent but does not achieve the minimax rate. We then propose and study algorithms that achieve the minimax rate over interesting sub-classes of the full stochastically transitive class. We complement our theoretical results with thorough numerical simulations.

In this paper we study a particular aspect of the urban community policing: routine patrol route planning. We seek routes that guarantee visibility, as this has a sizable impact on the community perceived safety, allowing quick emergency responses and providing surveillance of selected sites (e.g., hospitals, schools). The planning is restricted to the availability of vehicles and strives to achieve balanced routes. We study an adaptation of the model for the multi-vehicle covering tour problem, in which a set of locations must be visited, whereas another subset must be close enough to the planned routes. It constitutes an NP-complete integer programming problem. Suboptimal solutions are obtained with several heuristics, some adapted from the literature and others developed by us. We solve some adapted instances from TSPLIB and an instance with real data, the former being compared with results from literature, and latter being compared with empirical data.

Uninformed Search: This is used when creating an action sequence that doesn't account for any changes along the way. Heuristic Functions: These allow for decisions to be made without accurate or complete information. Adversarial or Moving Agent Search: This is used when there are other entities making decisions that influence one another. Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, associate professor in the department of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, teaches three courses: Artificial Intelligence 1, Artificial Intelligence 2 and Applied Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence 1 covers logic-based approaches, while Artificial Intelligence 2 showcases numerical and mathematically focused approaches based on probability theory.

Until Sep. 7, LinkedIn users searching for female contacts on the site may have noticed some strange results. Searches for common female names were yielding suggestions for male names as well. Take a LinkedIn search for "Stephanie Williams." Earlier this week, that query returned the result, "did you mean Stephen Williams?" (in addition to the 2,500-plus users actually named Stephanie Williams). A search for "Stephen Williams," however, simply displayed the 7,200 results for people with that name.

LinkedIn has changed the way it generates search results to remove prompts that had asked people who searched for some common female names if they meant to look for similar-sounding male names instead. The professional social networking site has rolled out a change to its search algorithm designed to recognize when a person searches for another user's full name, and doesn't try to prompt them to search for another one, spokeswoman Suzi Owens said in an email. The changes follow a Seattle Times report that found that, in searches for at least a dozen of the most common female names in the U.S., LinkedIn's results included a note asking if users had meant to look for a predominantly male name instead. A search for "Stephanie Williams" brought up a prompt asking if the searcher meant "Stephen Williams." The site similarly suggested changing Andrea to Andrew, Danielle to Daniel, and Michaela to Michael, among others.

Uninformed Search: This is used when creating an action sequence that doesn't account for any changes along the way. Heuristic Functions: These allow for decisions to be made without accurate or complete information. Adversarial or Moving Agent Search: This is used when there are other entities making decisions that influence one another. Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, associate professor in the department of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, teaches three courses: Artificial Intelligence 1, Artificial Intelligence 2 and Applied Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence 1 covers logic-based approaches, while Artificial Intelligence 2 showcases numerical and mathematically focused approaches based on probability theory.

The big news on March 12 of this year was of the Go-playing AI-system AlphaGo securing victory against 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol by winning the third straight game of a five-game match in Seoul, Korea. After Deep Blue's victory against chess world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, the game of Go was the next grand challenge for game-playing artificial intelligence. Go has defied the brute-force methods in game-tree search that worked so successfully in chess. In 2012, Communications published a Research Highlight article by Sylvain Gelly et al. on computer Go, which reported that "Programs based on Monte-Carlo tree search now play at human-master levels and are beginning to challenge top professional players." AlphaGo combines tree-search techniques with search-space reduction techniques that use deep learning. Its victory is a stunning achievement and another milestone in the inexorable march of AI research.

Determining optimal well placements and controls are two important tasks in oil field development. These problems are computationally expensive, nonconvex, and contain multiple optima. The practical solution of these problems require efficient and robust algorithms. In this paper, the multilevel coordinate search (MCS) algorithm is applied for well placement and control optimization problems. MCS is a derivative-free algorithm that combines global and local search. Both synthetic and real oil fields are considered. The performance of MCS is compared to generalized pattern search (GPS), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and covariance matrix adaptive evolution strategy (CMA-ES) algorithms. Results show that the MCS algorithm is strongly competitive, and outperforms for the joint optimization problem and with a limited computational budget. The effect of parameter settings for MCS are compared for the test examples. For the joint optimization problem we compare the performance of the simultaneous and sequential procedures and show the utility of the latter.