Christoffer Janson & Carl Landefjord

Connect Four with Reinforced Learning

Abstract

Machine learing is an umbrella term for certain types of learning algorithms in artificial intelligence. The purpose of machine learning is to make programs learn to performe tasks in accordance to certain given conditions. Reinforced learning is an area within machine learning which is all about making the program learn what is a good action by being rewarded.

One algorithm based on reinforcement learning is the Q-learning algorithm. It uses a table containing values for each state it has encountered. The table is updated with new values when new rewards are awarded by actions it has performed in the environment. This report describes how Q-learning can be implemented an how our implemention behaves against three different adversaries.

The purpose of this report is to investigate how the Q-learning learning vaiable α affects the rate of learning and for which values this implementation can performe optimaly. Our best result was α=0.9.