xplayer
Representing and Reasoning About the Rules of General Games With Imperfect Information
A general game player is a system that can play previously unknown games just by being given their rules. For this purpose, the Game Description Language (GDL) has been developed as a high-level knowledge representation formalism to communicate game rules to players. In this paper, we address a fundamental limitation of state-of-the-art methods and systems for General Game Playing, namely, their being confined to deterministic games with complete information about the game state. We develop a simple yet expressive extension of standard GDL that allows for formalising the rules of arbitrary finite, n-player games with randomness and incomplete state knowledge. In the second part of the paper, we address the intricate reasoning challenge for general game-playing systems that comes with the new description language. We develop a full embedding of extended GDL into the Situation Calculus augmented by Scherl and Levesque's knowledge fluent. We formally prove that this provides a sound and complete reasoning method for players' knowledge about game states as well as about the knowledge of the other players.
Reasoning About General Games Described in GDL-II
Schiffel, Stephan (Reykjavik University) | Thielscher, Michael (The University of New South Wales)
Recently the general Game Description Language (GDL) has been extended so as to cover arbitrary games with incomplete/imperfect information. Learning — without human intervention — to play such games poses a reasoning challenge for general game-playing systems that is much more intricate than in case of complete information games. Action formalisms like the Situation Calculus have been developed for precisely this purpose. In this paper we present a full embedding of the Game Description Language into the Situation Calculus (with Scherl and Levesque's knowledge fluent ). We formally prove that this provides a sound and complete reasoning method for players' knowledge about game states as well as about the knowledge of the other players.
Layer-Abstraction for Symbolically Solving General Two-Player Games
Kissmann, Peter (TZI, University of Bremen) | Edelkamp, Stefan (TZI, University of Bremen)
One of the latest prominent results was by Schaeffer In recent years general game playing has received an increasing et al. (2007), who were able to solve American Checkers after amount of attention, especially due to the annual more than ten years of computation and proved that the general game playing competition (Genesereth, Love, and optimal outcome is a draw. Of course, due to the domain Pell 2005) that is held at AAAI or IJCAI since 2005. In independent scenario, we cannot expect to come up with solutions general game playing the agents are provided a description for such complex games in general game playing. of a game according to certain rules and need to play it. In explicit representation, many general games are too In case of multi-player games the agents often play against complex to fit into RAM or even on a hard disk. So, to solve each other, while in case of single-player games the agent them we perform symbolic search, which utilizes binary decision tries to find a sequence of moves to reach a terminal state diagrams (BDDs) (Bryant 1986) as they decrease the where it can achieve the best reward possible. The authors memory consumption, if a good variable ordering is found. of the agents do not know which games will be played, so In this paper we will present a new approach to solve general no domain specific knowledge can be inserted.
A Temporal Proof System for General Game Playing
Thielscher, Michael (The University of New South Wales) | Voigt, Sebastian (Dresden University of Technology)
A general game player is a system that understands the rules of unknown games and learns to play these games well without human intervention. A major challenge for research in General Game Playing is to endow a player with the ability to extract and prove game-specific knowledge from the mere game rules. We define a formal language to express temporally extended — yet local — properties of games. We also develop a provably correct proof theory for this language using the paradigm of Answer Set Programming, and we report on experiments with a practical implementation of this proof system in combination with a successful general game player.
Automated Theorem Proving for General Game Playing
Schiffel, Stephan (Dresden University of Technology) | Thielscher, Michael (Dresden University of Technology)
A general game player is a system that understands the rules of an unknown game and learns to play this game well without human intervention. To succeed in this endeavor, systems need to be able to extract and prove game-specific knowledge from the mere game rules. We present a practical approach to this challenge with the help of Answer Set Programming. The key idea is to reduce the automated theorem proving task to a simple proof of an induction step and its base case. We prove correctness of this method and report on experiments with an off-the-shelf Answer Set Programming system in combination with a successful general game player.