Minibal: Balanced Game-Playing Without Opponent Modeling

ArXi:2603.23059v1 Announce Type: new Recent advances in game AI, such as AlphaZero and Ath\'enan, have achieved superhuman performance across a wide range of board games. While highly powerful, these agents are ill-suited for human-AI interaction, as they consistently overwhelm human players, offering little enjoyment and limited educational value. This paper addresses the problem of balanced play, in which an agent challenges its opponent without either dominating or conceding.