This September we attended to the IEEE CIG 2017 Conference in Santorini, Greece, to present the paper «Evolutionary Deckbuilding in HearthStone». This paper was written in collaboration with our colleagues Alberto Tonda and Giovanni Squillero.
The story of this paper started a (not so) long time ago while me and Alberto were discussing about how awesome HearthStone is. Suddenly, we thought about how easy it would be to create the constraints for the uGP framework, and that there were some open source simulators of the game. In a while, we already had the constraints, the simulator adapted to accept individuals from uGP, and some experiments running.
And we finished the paper after, of course.
You can download the paper draft from here (the electronic original version is not available yet).
And here is the presentation:
The abstract:
—One of the most notable features of collectible card games is deckbuilding, that is, defining a personalized deck before the real game. Deckbuilding is a challenge that involves a big and rugged search space, with different and unpredictable behaviour
after simple card changes and even hidden information. In this paper, we explore the possibility of automated deckbuilding: a genetic algorithm is applied to the task, with the evaluation delegated to a game simulator that tests every potential deck against a varied and representative range of human-made decks.
In these preliminary experiments, the approach has proven able to create quite effective decks, a promising result that proves that, even in this challenging environment, evolutionary algorithms can find good solutions.
GeNeura Team 