DOI = "doi:10.11606/T.55.2021.tde-21122021-111842",
size = "101 pages",
abstract = "Interpretable and explainable Artificial Intelligence
(AI) is projected as one of the most important topics
for the community in the next years. In addition to
developing effective AI approaches that can help humans
solving problems, it might be necessary to understand
the reasons behind the decisions of such approaches to
finally trust in their behaviour. Search and
learning-based algorithms represent the current
state-of-the-art approaches for planning in zero-sum
real-time games. The problem with those approaches is
that usually the behavior of their resulting agents is
not interpretable. On the other hand, hard-coded
programs usually are not as effective as searchbased
methods but have an important vantage; they can be more
easily interpretable. In this thesis, we present a
collection of works where we approach the problem of
synthesizing effective interpretable scripts for
planning in zero-sum real-time domains. First, we
approach the problem of generating a set of scripts
that can be used as an action abstraction to reduce
search action spaces in zero-sum real-time strategy
games. Namely, we present an evolutionary approach that
can generate action abstractions that search-based
algorithms can use for planning. Search-based systems
that use action abstractions generated by our system
outperformed the state-of-the-art search-based methods
we use for experiments and won the 2018 microRTS
competition. We also present Gesy and LS2, two systems
focused on synthesizing scripts that can plan by
themselves in zero-sum real-time strategy games. Gesy
is a system that uses a Genetic Programming (GP)
approach to synthesize interpretable scripts. LS2 is a
system that combines a novel method to reduce
Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), and a local-search
algorithm that uses self play to synthesize
interpretable scripts. The scripts Gesy and LS2
synthesize are competitive with complex search-based
methods and scripts designed by professional
programmers. We also show that the scripts synthesized
by both systems can be used to discover possible
optimizations that programmers could include in their
implementations.",