MiniPool: Real-time artificial player for a 8-Ball video game

The importance of artificial intelligence in games has been growing over the years due to their continuous increasing realism and the need to keep their immersiveness while playing. Games like 8-Ball offer many interesting challenges to both communities of AI and optimization duo to the continuous and stochastic characteristics of the domain. To succeed a player must be able o plan the best sequence of shots and execute a shot with accuracy and precision, so he doesn’t lose the turn. There are already several good artificial players developed, however they tend to take more than 30 seconds to select and executed a shot. Under normal circumstances a player would give up playing the game if he had to wait that long to play. In this document I propose a real-time solution for a 8-Ball artificial player using a Monte-Carlo Expectimax hybrid search algorithm with raytracing techniques.