The International General Game Playing Competition

The establishment of the International General Game Playing Competition in 2005, however, resulted in a renewed interest in more general problem-solving approaches to game playing. In general game playing (GGP) the goal is to create gameplaying systems that autonomously learn how to play a wide variety of games skillfully, given only the descriptions of the game rules. In this paper we review the history of the competition, discuss progress made so far, and list outstanding research challenges. Unlike specialized game players, such as Deep Blue (Campbell, Hoane, and Hsu 2002), general game players cannot rely on algorithms designed in advance for specific games; they must discover such algorithms themselves. General game playing expertise depends on intelligence on the part of the game player rather than intelligence of the programmer of the game player.