Risk and survival objectives

The technique

When the game ends the first time you go broke, the average payout is the wrong thing to maximise; you also have to care about the bad tail.

Approaches using this technique

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

Learn the whole spread of how long a game might last, and only leave the safe move when the evidence says so.

Instead of judging a column by its average outcome, judge it partly by its worst outcomes, and find that the resulting policy dies much sooner.

Play normally on a healthy board, then switch to worst-case thinking when height, crowding, or covered discs put the game at risk.

Clear numbered discs and open covered ones fast enough to keep the board from filling.

Ranks columns partly by their worst imagined futures. Every tested risk setting trails the baseline.

Adds one human rule to the depth-4 search by refusing risky drops above a disc's vertical safe zone, then tests whether the rule extends life.

Retunes an existing policy for survival milestones instead of average score while changing nothing else. The result barely moved.

Agent contextApproach directories in this group, by family

constructive-reservoir

fair-expectimax

heuristic-search

lifetime-objective

value-policy-learning