Agent 05 · Genetic algorithm
The game
A 40-square property-trading board game with its own streets: buy what you land on, complete a colour group, build houses, and collect rent until rivals go bankrupt. Cards, taxes, jail and simple trades are included. It is inspired by The Landlord's Game of 1904, the ancestor of the genre.
Genetic algorithm
Each strategy is 16 numbers: how much cash to keep, how badly it wants each colour, when to build, how many houses, when to pay out of jail, and how much to offer or demand in trades. Every generation the 24 strategies play 48 games; the best six survive unchanged and the rest are bred from winners with small random mutations.
The heat map
Jail is the most visited square, because so many cards and rolls send you there. That makes the squares six to nine steps after it, like the orange Market group here, land more often than the rest, which is the kind of edge the strategies discover on their own.