Gomoku RL

Documentation: https://hesic73.github.io/gomoku_rl/

[TOC]

Introduction

gomoku_rl is an open-sourced project that trains agents to play the game of Gomoku through deep reinforcement learning. Previous works often rely on variants of AlphaGo/AlphaZero and inefficiently use GPU resources. Notably, many existing projects are limited to small boards, with only a few exceptions. [1] incorporates curriculum learning and other enhancements; [2] and [3] collect transitions from multiple environments and also parallelize MCTS execution. In contrast, gomoku_rl features GPU-parallelized simulation and leverages recent advancements in MARL. Starting from random play, a model can achieve human-level performance on a $15\times15$ board within hours of training on a 3090.

Installation

Install gomoku_rl with the following command:

git clone [email protected]:hesic73/gomoku_rl.git
cd gomoku_rl
conda create -n gomoku python=3.11.5
conda activate gomoku
pip install -e .

I use python 3.11.5, torch 2.1.0 and torchrl 0.2.1. Lower versions of python and torch 1.x should be compatible as well.

Getting Started

gomoku_rl uses hydra to configure training hyperparameters. You can modify the settings in cfg/train_InRL.yaml or override them via the command line:

# override default settings in cfg/train_InRL.yaml
python scripts/train_InRL.py num_env=1024 device=cuda epochs=500 wandb.mode=online
# or simply:
python scripts/train_InRL.py.py

The default location for saving checkpoints is wandb/*/files or tempfile.gettempdir() if wandb.mode=='disabled'. Modify the output directory by specifying the run_dir parameter.

After training, play Gomoku with your model using the scripts/demo.py script:

# Install PyQt5
pip install PyQt5
python scripts/demo.py device=cpu grid_size=56 piece_radius=24 checkpoint=/model/path
# default checkpoint (only for board_size=15)
python scripts/demo.py

Pretrained models for a $15\times15$ board are available under pretrained_models/15_15/. Be aware that using the wrong model for the board size will lead to loading errors due to mismatches in AI architectures. In PPO, when share_network=True, the actor and the critic could utilize a shared encoding module. At present, a PPO object with a shared encoder cannot load from a checkpoint without sharing.

GUI

Note: for deployment, we opt for torch.jit.ScriptModule instead of torch.nn.Module. The *.pt files used in scripts/train_*.py are state dicts of a torch.nn.Module and cannot be directly utilized in this context.

In addition to scripts/demo.py, there is a standalone C++ GUI application. To compile the source code, make sure to have Qt, Libtorch and cmake installed. Refer to https://pytorch.org/cppdocs/installing.html for instructions on how to install C++ distributions of Pytorch.

Here are the commands to build the executable:

# Make a directory
mkdir build; cd build

# Generate the build system
# If torch is not installed on your computer, specify the absolute path to Libtorch
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/absolute/path/to/libtorch ../src

# Alternatively, if torch is installed, use the following command
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=`python3 -c 'import torch;print(torch.utils.cmake_prefix_path)'` ../src

# Build the executable
cmake --build . --config Release

PS: If CMake cannot find Torch, try set(Torch_DIR /absolute/path/to/libtorch/share/cmake/torch).

Algorithms

Presently, the framework incorporates PPO and DQN algorithms, with a designed flexibility for incorporating additional RL methods. In the realm of multi-agent training, it supports Independent RL and PSRO.

Notably, Independent RL has demonstrated superior efficacy over PSRO. As mentioned in [1], due to Gomoku's asymmetry, it's hard to train a network to play both black and white.

(Maybe I need to tune hyperparameters for PSRO.)

Details

Free-style Gomoku is a two-player zero-sum extensive-form game. Two players alternatively place black and white stones on a board and the first who forms an unbroken line of five or more stones of his color wins. In the context of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), two agents learn in the environment competitively. During each agent's turn, its observation is the (encoded) current board state, and its action is the selection of a position on the board to place a stone. We use action masking to prevent illegal moves. Winning rewards the agent with +1, while losing incurs a penalty of -1.

TO DO

• Restructure the code to decouple rollout functionality from GomokuEnv.
• Enhance documentaion.
• Further improvement

References

• [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.10595

• [2] https://github.com/initial-h/AlphaZero_Gomoku_MPI

• [3] https://github.com/hijkzzz/alpha-zero-gomoku

• [4] A Unified Game-Theoretic Approach to Multiagent Reinforcement Learning

• [5] What Matters In On-Policy Reinforcement Learning? A Large-Scale Empirical Study

Citation

Please use this bibtex if you want to cite this repository:

@misc{He2023gomoku_rl,
  author = {He, Sicheng},
  title = {gomoku_rl},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/hesic73/gomoku_rl}},
}