Course Description

Lecturers:

Prof. Michael Thielscher, Stephan Schiffel

Prerequisites:

Programming expertise

A General Game Playing System is one that can accept a formal description of a game and play the game effectively without human intervention. Unlike specialized game players, such as Deep Blue, GGP systems cannot rely on algorithms designed in advance for specific games. GGP expertise depends on intelligence on the part of the game player and not just intelligence on the part of the programmer of the game player. For this reason, GGP is a good area in which to develop and demonstrate General AI techniques (such as knowledge representation, reasoning, learning, and rational behavior). This course is a hands-on introduction to GGP and, by extension, Artificial Intelligence. Theoretical background is provided through lectures, but the main pedagogical value of the course derives from the students´ work in using this theory to create GGP systems to compete with each other.

Time Table

• Mondays:
  • 4. DS (E005)

Consultations

During the Open House or by appointment.

Slides

• Lecture 1 (Mon, 13 Oct 2008): Introduction
• Lecture 2 (Mon, 27 Oct 2008): Game Description Language
• Lecture 3 (Mon, 10 Nov 2008): State-Space Search and Planning
• Lecture 4 (Mon, 24 Nov 2008): Incomplete Information
• Lecture 5 (Mon, 08 Dec 2008): Automated Reasoning
• Lecture 6 (Mon, 05 Jan 2009): Metagaming
• Lecture 7 (Mon, 26 Jan 2009): Game Theory

Tutorials

• Tutorial 1 (Mon, 20 Oct 2008)
  If you use the basic Java player you can download two classes here, that might help you with exercise 1.4.
• Tutorial 2 (Mon, 03 Nov 2008)
  Scrambled game descriptions for exercise 2.2: game1.gdl, game2.gdl
• Tutorial 3 (Mon, 17 Nov 2008)
• Tutorial 4 (Mon, 01 Dec 2008)
  The games.zip file now contains two additional games for tutorial 4.1.
• Tutorial 5 (Mon, 15 Dec 2008)
• Tutorial 6 (Mon, 12 Jan 2009)
• Tutorial 7 (Mon, 02 Feb 2009)

Test-Run

On Tuesday, 24 March 2009, we had a test run of the programs of all teams.

The following games were played during the test-run:

1. Coins (from lecture 3)
2. 10-Queens-Problem - place ten queens on a 10x10 board such that they don't attack each other
3. Sheep and Wolf
4. Rock, Paper, Scissors with 3 players
5. Chinese Checkers - 3 player version

Competition

On 02 April 2009, we held a competition between the programs of all teams that attended the lecture. Details about the participants and the games that were played can be found at the competition website.

Reference Players / Starter Code

• Simple players implemented in Prolog, Java, and C++ are available at http://www.general-game-playing.de/. Those players are supported by us. That means we'll fix bugs and we are open to suggestions for improvements to these players.
• Reference players provided by Stanford University

Additional References

• GGP website of Stanford University
• Specification of the GDL and description of the communication protocol
• GGP research project of TU-Dresden
• Palamedes GDL Editor
• GameController - a Java program which simulates the Gamemaster
• Selection of games for testing