A New Challenge: Approaching Tetris Link with AI

Abstract: Decades of research have been invested in making computer programs for playing games such as Chess and Go. This paper focuses on a new game, Tetris Link, a board game that is still lacking any scientific analysis. Tetris Link has a large branching factor, hampering a traditional heuristic planning approach. We explore heuristic planning and two other approaches: Reinforcement Learning, Monte Carlo tree search. We document our approach and report on their relative performance in a tournament. Curiously, the heuristic approach is stronger than the planning/learning approaches. However, experienced human players easily win the majority of the matches against the heuristic planning AIs. We, therefore, surmise that Tetris Link is more difficult than expected. We offer our findings to the community as a challenge to improve upon.