Competition between MCTS and UCT in the game of Tic-Tac-Toe
Go is an extremely complex strategic board game despite its simple rules and is the great challenging classic game for AI due to its enormous search space. The computer program AlphaGo finally defeated Fan Hui, the European Go champion, without handicaps on a full-sized 19 ×19 board in October 2015. Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a widely-used algorithm for game-tree search in game playing. MCTS based on statistical sampling is a best-first tree search technique to evaluate states; UCT which is a variant of MCTS uses the UCB1 formula as selection policy. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of MCTS and UCT playing against each other in the game of Tic-Tac-Toe. The experimental results show that the first player UCT is slightly superior to the second player MCTS (54.3±1.0%), the first player is always advantageous to the second player regardless of the MCTS and UCT players, and the result of each game should be a tie if both players do their best in Tic-Tac-Toe.