Azalea

playing to learn to play

Azalea is a reinterpretation of the AlphaZero game AI learning algorithm for the Hex board game.

Quick start

1. Install (requires Python 3.6, virtualenv recommended):

pip install azalea

2. Download the pre-trained model hex11-20180712-3362.policy.pth
3. Play against the pre-trained model:

azalea-play hex11-20180712-3362.policy.pth

You can use the --first option if you wish to play first.

Features

• Straightforward reimplementation of the AlphaZero algorithm except for MCTS parallelization (see below)
• Pre-trained model for Hex board game
• Fast MCTS implementation through Numba JIT acceleration.
• Fast Hex game move generation implementation through Numba.
• Parallelized self play to saturate Nvidia V100 GPU during training
• AI policy evaluation through round robin tournament, also parallelized
• Tested on Ubuntu 16.04
• Requires Python 3.6 and PyTorch 0.4

Differences to published AlphaZero

• Single GPU implementation only - tested on Nvidia V100, with 8 CPU's for move generation and MCTS, and 1 GPU for the policy network.
• Pre-trained model has smaller capacity: resnet having 6 blocks of 64 channels instead of 19 (or 39) blocks of 256 channels
• Only Hex game is implemented, though the code supports adding more games. Two components are needed for a new game: move generator and policy network, with board input and moves output adjusted to the new game.
• MCTS simulations are not run in parallel threads, but instead, self-play games are played in parallel processes. This is to avoid the need for a multi-threaded MCTS implementation while still maintaining fast training speed and saturating the GPU.
• MCTS simulation and board evaluations are batched according to search_batch_size config parameter. "Virtual loss" is used as in AlphaZero, to increase search diversity.

Installation

Clone the repository and install dependencies with Conda:

git clone https://github.com/jseppanen/azalea.git
conda env create -n azalea
source activate azalea

The default environment.yml installs GPU packages but you can choose environment-cpu.yml for testing on a laptop.

Playing against pretrained model

python play.py models/hex11-20180712-3362.policy.pth

This will load the model and start playing, asking for your move. The columns are labeled a–k and rows 1–11. The first player, playing X's, is trying to draw a vertical connected path through the board, while the second player, with O's, is drawing a horizontal path.

O O O O X . . . . . . 
 . . . . . . . . . . . 
  . . . . . . . . . . . 
   . . . . X . . . . . . 
    . . . . . X . . . . . 
     . . . . . . . . . . . 
      . . . . X . . . . . . 
       . . . . . . . . . . . 
        . . . X . . . . . . . 
  x      . . . . . . . . . . . 
 o\\      . . . . . . . . . . . 
last move: e1
Your move? 

Model training

python train.py --config config/hex11_train_config.yml --rundir runs/train

Model comparison

python compare.py --config config/hex11_eval_config.yml --rundir runs/compare <mode1> <model2> [model3] ...

Model selection

python tune.py

References

• Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge
• Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm