Tips on encoding Board Game State for network inputs / MCTS?

I’ve been playing with MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search) and Neural Nets for doing board game and card game AI, for game balancing and testing, and AI opponents. I’m using a similar approach as AlphaZero but much simpler and much smaller networks. I’m much more interested in making a system that can play many games plausibly than trying to be superhuman. I’ve got a basic understanding of it and the MCTS works pretty well, however the biggest problem I’m running …

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