Strength Estimation and Human-Like Strength Adjustment in Games

Strength estimation and adjustment are crucial in designing human-AI interactions, particularly in games where AI surpasses human players. This paper introduces a novel strength system, including a strength estimator (SE) and an SE-based Monte Carlo tree search, denoted as SE-MCTS, which predicts strengths from games and offers different playing strengths with human styles. The strength estimator calculates strength scores and predicts ranks from games without direct human interaction. SE-MCTS utilizes the strength scores in a Monte Carlo tree search to adjust playing strength and style. We first conduct experiments in Go, a challenging board game with a wide range of ranks. Our strength estimator significantly achieves over 80% accuracy in predicting ranks by observing 15 games only, whereas the previous method reached 49% accuracy for 100 games. For strength adjustment, SE-MCTS successfully adjusts to designated ranks while achieving a 51.33% accuracy in aligning to human actions, outperforming a previous stateof-the-art, with only 42.56% accuracy. To demonstrate the generality of our strength system, we further apply SE and SE-MCTS to chess and obtain consistent results. These results show a promising approach to strength estimation and adjustment, enhancing human-AI interactions in games. Artificial intelligence has achieved superhuman performance in various domains in recent years, especially in games (Silver et al., 2018; Schrittwieser et al., 2020; Vinyals et al., 2019; OpenAI et al., 2019). These achievements have raised interests within the community in exploring AI programs for human interactions, particularly in estimating human players' strengths and offering corresponding levels to increase entertainment or improve skills (Demediuk et al., 2017; Fan et al., 2019; Moon & Seo, 2020; Gusmão et al., 2015; Silva et al., 2015; Hunicke & Chapman, 2004).