Investigating MCTS Modifications in General Video Game Playing

While Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) methods have shown promise in a variety of different board games, more complex video games still present significant challenges. Recently, several modifications to the core MCTS algorithm have been proposed with the hope to increase its effectiveness on arcade-style video games. This paper investigates of how well these modifications perform in general video game playing using the general video game AI (GVG-AI) framework and introduces a new MCTS modification called UCT reverse penalty that penalizes the MCTS controller for exploring recently visited children. The results of our experiments show that a combination of two MCTS modifications can improve the performance of the vanilla MCTS controller, but the effectiveness of the modifications highly depends on the particular game being played.