Optimizing the State Evaluation Heuristic of Abalone using Evolutionary Algorithms.pdfVIP

Optimizing the State Evaluation Heuristic of Abalone using Evolutionary Algorithms Benjamin Rhew December 1, 2005 1 Introduction Heuristics are used in many applications today, from speech recognition tech- nology to filters used in fighting spam. They are so prevalent that everyone comes into contact with them during everyday life. Yet, there is still room for improvement. The problem with heuristics is that they are usually either able to find guaranteed good solutions with a poor running time, or run fast but find poor solutions. Optimizing heuristics can help with these inherent problems, and make applications using them more effective. However, the optimization of a heuristic is difficult. Hand-tuning of a heuris- tic can provide some benefits, but often the heuristic being optimized is com- plex, and a human guessing at optimal parameters can produce sub-optimal performance. Also, non-obvious parameters can have a drastic effect on the performance of a heuristic. Because of these limitations, an automated method of testing different tunings of a heuristic is sought. One such method of automation is using an evolutionary algorithm. This allows many different possible sets of heuristics to be tested, especially ones with non-obvious parameter sets. This, however, can take a long time, depending on how complex the original problem is, and how long it takes to evaluate possible heuristics. To prove the concept, one must start with a simple problem. One such possible problem is the optimization of the evaluation function of abalone, a computerized version of a boardgame. It already has a partially hand-tuned heuristic to start with, so the evolutionary algorithm will only modify the pre- existing heuristi