Heuristic evaluation

The technique

When the search has to stop before the game ends, a hand-written formula guesses how good the board it stopped at is.

Approaches using this technique

11 approaches, featured pages first. Each card is one theory of how to choose a column and what happened when it was tried.

Heuristic evaluationfeatured

Paying the search for clears and reveals

Rewards clears and reveals inside search to test whether faster board flow improves survival.

rejectedrecorded

Heuristic evaluationfeatured

The fair leaf evaluator

The hand-written board evaluator every search in this family uses at the bottom of its look-ahead, and the tuning bench its coefficients came from.

completedrecorded

Heuristic evaluation

Accessible energy

Turn the board properties that separate a future-reading planner's positions from ordinary ones into a handful of readable numbers, and let a legal search use them.

rejectedrecorded

Heuristic evaluation

Adding a rise-cycle residual to the evaluator

Adds a small rise-cycle term to board evaluation and preserves the fitted weights for later work.

completedrecorded

Heuristic evaluation

Bringing back the old placement rewards

Restores immediate move rewards inside deeper search, then tests a reduced two-term version.

rejectedrecorded

Heuristic evaluation

Chain-reveal leaf substrate

Adds seven reveal-construction terms (aligned double hit, chain-to-crack, entombed high, and their danger-gated forms) on top of the frozen fair leaf through a memoised, generated search whose zero-weight arm is gated bit-identical to the unchanged search.

rejectedrecorded

Heuristic evaluation

Edge priority

Turn two claims from an experienced player into measurable evaluator changes by attacking high covered discs and distrusting edge columns.

Heuristic evaluation

Leaf Reweight

Turns the nineteen weights of the reference search's hand-written board-scoring function into run-time data, so that refitted weight vectors can be tested with nothing else about the search changed.

rejectedreproduced

Heuristic evaluation

Phase horizon

Judge a board by how it will look when the next row rises. The same board is more dangerous one drop from a rise than five drops away.

rejected

Heuristic evaluation

Tunneling

Dig a channel down beside the tall side of the board so that the dangerous gray discs high up can actually be reached and opened.

completed

Heuristic evaluation

Virtual ignition

Before choosing a column, imagine dropping a few imaginary discs onto the board to see which arrangements would go off like a firework, and prefer the boards that would.

rejected

Agent contextApproach directories in this group, by family

fair-expectimax

heuristic-search

lifetime-objective

oracle-curriculum

approaches/oracle-curriculum/accessible-energy