Hybrid of Evolution and Reinforcement Learning for Othello Players

Although the reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithm show good results in board evaluation optimization, the hybrid of both approaches is rarely addressed in the literature. In this paper, the evolutionary algorithm is boosted using resources from the reinforcement learning. 1) The initialization of initial population using solution optimized by temporal difference learning 2) Exploitation of domain knowledge extracted from reinforcement learning. Experiments on Othello game strategies show that the proposed methods can effectively search the solution space and improve the performance