It is easy to create new combinatorial games but more difficult to predict those that will intere... more It is easy to create new combinatorial games but more difficult to predict those that will interest human players. We examine the concept of game quality, its automated measurement through self-play simulations, and its use in the evolutionary search for new high-quality games. A general game system called Ludi is described and experiments conducted to test its ability to synthesize and evaluate new games. Results demonstrate the validity of the approach through the automated creation of novel, interesting, and publishable games.
In this paper we present a process for automatically generating manuals for board games within th... more In this paper we present a process for automatically generating manuals for board games within the Ludii general game system. This process requires many different sub-tasks to be addressed, such as English translation of Ludii game descriptions, move visualisation, highlighting winning moves, strategy explanation, among others. These aspects are then combined to create a full manual for any given game. This manual is intended to provide a more intuitive explanation of a game's rules and mechanics, particularly for players who are less familiar with the Ludii game description language and grammar.
There are several different game description languages (GDLs), each intended to allow wide ranges... more There are several different game description languages (GDLs), each intended to allow wide ranges of arbitrary games (i.e., general games) to be described in a single higher-level language than general-purpose programming languages. Games described in such formats can subsequently be presented as challenges for automated general game playing agents, which are expected to be capable of playing any arbitrary game described in such a language without prior knowledge about the games to be played. The language used by the Ludii general game system was previously shown to be capable of representing equivalent games for any arbitrary, finite, deterministic, fully observable extensive-form game. In this paper, we prove its universality by extending this to include finite nondeterministic and imperfect-information games.
Game boards are described in the Ludii general game system by their underlying graphs, based on t... more Game boards are described in the Ludii general game system by their underlying graphs, based on tiling, shape and graph operators, with the automatic detection of important properties such as topological relationships between graph elements, directions and radial step sequences. This approach allows most conceivable game boards to be described simply and succinctly.
Combinations of Monte-Carlo tree search and Deep Neural Networks, trained through self-play, have... more Combinations of Monte-Carlo tree search and Deep Neural Networks, trained through self-play, have produced state-of-the-art results for automated game-playing in many board games. The training and search algorithms are not gamespecific, but every individual game that these approaches are applied to still requires domain knowledge for the implementation of the game's rules, and constructing the neural network's architecture -in particular the shapes of its input and output tensors. Ludii is a general game system that already contains over 1,000 different games, which can rapidly grow thanks to its powerful and user-friendly game description language. Polygames is a framework with training and search algorithms, which has already produced superhuman players for several board games. This paper describes the implementation of a bridge between Ludii and Polygames, which enables Polygames to train and evaluate models for games that are implemented and run through Ludii. We do not require any game-specific domain knowledge anymore, and instead leverage our domain knowledge of the Ludii system and its abstract state and move representations to write functions that can automatically determine the appropriate shapes for input and output tensors for any game implemented in Ludii. We describe experimental results for short training runs in a wide variety of different board games, and discuss several open problems and avenues for future research.
This paper proposes a new game-search algorithm, PN-MCTS, which combines Monte-Carlo Tree Search ... more This paper proposes a new game-search algorithm, PN-MCTS, which combines Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and Proof-Number Search (PNS). These two algorithms have been successfully applied for decision making in a range of domains. We define three areas where the additional knowledge provided by the proof and disproof numbers gathered in MCTS trees might be used: final move selection, solving subtrees, and the UCB1 selection mechanism. We test all possible combinations on different time settings, playing against vanilla UCT on several games: Lines of Action (7×7 and 8×8 board sizes), MiniShogi, Knightthrough, and Awari. Furthermore, we extend this new algorithm to properly address games with draws, like Awari, by adding an additional layer of PNS on top of the MCTS tree. The experiments show that PN-MCTS is able to outperform MCTS in all tested game domains, achieving win rates up to 96.2% for Lines of Action.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jul 1, 2019
Bien que les systèmes actuels de General Game Playing (GGP) facilitent la recherche en Intelligen... more Bien que les systèmes actuels de General Game Playing (GGP) facilitent la recherche en Intelligence Artificielle (IA) autour des jeux, ils sont souvent trop spécialisés et fournissent une capacité de calcul trop faible. Cet article décrit une première version du système ludémique de GGP dénommé LUDII qui apporte un outil efficace à la recherche en IA tout autant qu'aux concepteurs de jeux ou aux historiens mais aussi dans bien d'autres domaines. LUDII définit les jeux comme des arbres de ludèmes, correspondant à des concepts et mécanismes de jeu de haut niveau et facilement interprétables. Nous établissons les bases de LUDII en analysant ses principaux avantages : généralité, extensibilité, compréhensibilité et efficacité. Expérimentalement, LUDII surpasse l'un des plus performants raisonneurs décrit avec le General Game Description Language (GDL), basé sur un réseau de propositions (propnet), pour tous les jeux disponibles sur le serveur GGP.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 10, 2020
This technical report outlines the fundamental workings of the game logic behind Ludii, a general... more This technical report outlines the fundamental workings of the game logic behind Ludii, a general game system, that can be used to play a wide variety of games. Ludii is a program developed for the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project, in which mathematical and computational approaches are used to study how games were played, and spread, throughout history. This report explains how general game states and equipment are represented in Ludii, and how the rule ludemes dictating play are implemented behind the scenes, giving some insight into the core game logic behind the Ludii general game player. This guide is intended to help game designers using the Ludii game description language to understand it more completely and make fuller use of its features when describing their games.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Aug 29, 2020
While current General Game Playing (GGP) systems facilitate useful research in Artificial Intelli... more While current General Game Playing (GGP) systems facilitate useful research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game-playing, they are often somewhat specialized and computationally inefficient. In this paper, we describe an initial version of a "ludemic" general game system called Ludii, which has the potential to provide an efficient tool for AI researchers as well game designers, historians, educators and practitioners in related fields. Ludii defines games as structures of ludemes, i.e. highlevel, easily understandable game concepts. We establish the foundations of Ludii by outlining its main benefits: generality, extensibility, understandability and efficiency. Experimentally, Ludii outperforms one of the most efficient Game Description Language (GDL) reasoners, based on a propositional network, for all available games in the Tiltyard GGP repository.
This paper presents a general approach for measuring distances between board games within the Lud... more This paper presents a general approach for measuring distances between board games within the Ludii general game system. These distances are calculated using a previously published set of general board game concepts, each of which represents a common game idea or shared property. Our results compare and contrast two different measures of distance, highlighting the subjective nature of such metrics and discussing the different ways that they can be interpreted.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Aug 20, 2019
Ludii is a general game system being developed as part of the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project (... more Ludii is a general game system being developed as part of the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project (DLP). While its primary aim is to model, play, and analyse the full range of traditional strategy games, Ludii also has the potential to support a wide range of AI research topics and competitions. This paper describes some of the future competitions and challenges that we intend to run using the Ludii system, highlighting some of its most important aspects that can potentially lead to many algorithm improvements and new avenues of research. We compare and contrast our proposed competition motivations, goals and frameworks against those of existing general game playing competitions, addressing the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.
In many board games and other abstract games, patterns have been used as features that can guide ... more In many board games and other abstract games, patterns have been used as features that can guide automated game-playing agents. Such patterns or features often represent particular configurations of pieces, empty positions, etc., which may be relevant for a game's strategies. Their use has been particularly prevalent in the game of Go, but also many other games used as benchmarks for AI research. Simple, linear policies of such features are unlikely to produce state-of-the-art playing strength like the deep neural networks that have been more commonly used in recent years do. However, they typically require significantly fewer resources to train, which is paramount for large-scale studies of hundreds to thousands of distinct games. In this paper, we formulate a design and efficient implementation of spatial state-action features for general games. These are patterns that can be trained to incentivise or disincentivise actions based on whether or not they match variables of the state in a local area around action variables. We provide extensive details on several design and implementation choices, with a primary focus on achieving a high degree of generality to support a wide variety of different games using different board geometries or other graphs. Secondly, we propose an efficient approach for evaluating active features for any given set of features. In this approach, we take inspiration from heuristics used in problems such as SAT to optimise the order in which parts of patterns are matched and prune unnecessary evaluations. An empirical evaluation on 33 distinct games in the Ludii general game system demonstrates the efficiency of this approach in comparison to a naive baseline, as well as a baseline based on prefix trees.
Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), Aug 11, 2019
People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the ... more People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Apr 23, 2019
People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the ... more People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:
People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the ... more People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:
Ludii is a new general game system, currently under development, which aims to support a wider ra... more Ludii is a new general game system, currently under development, which aims to support a wider range of games than existing systems and approaches. It is being developed primarily for the task of game design, but o↵ers a number of other potential benefits for game and AI researchers, professionals and hobbyists. This paper is based on an interactive demonstration of Ludii at thuis year's Advances in Computer Games conference (ACG 2019). It describes the approach behind Ludii, how it works, how it is used, and what it can potentially do.
Humans tend to learn complex abstract concepts faster if examples are presented in a structured m... more Humans tend to learn complex abstract concepts faster if examples are presented in a structured manner. For instance, when learning how to play a board game, usually one of the first concepts learned is how the game ends, i.e. the actions that lead to a terminal state (win, lose or draw). The advantage of learning end-games first is that once the actions which lead to a terminal state are understood, it becomes possible to incrementally learn the consequences of actions that are further away from a terminal state-we call this an end-game-first curriculum. Currently the state-of-the-art machine learning player for general board games, AlphaZero by Google DeepMind, does not employ a structured training curriculum; instead learning from the entire game at all times. By employing an end-game-first training curriculum to train an AlphaZero inspired player, we empirically show that the rate of learning of an artificial player can be improved when compared to a player not using a training curriculum.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Apr 13, 2021
The French Military Game was described and analyzed for the first time by Édouard Lucas (1842-189... more The French Military Game was described and analyzed for the first time by Édouard Lucas (1842-1891), in an article published in 1887 in La Nature. According to him, the Military Game was in vogue in the military circles at that time, since the game was designed by Louis Dyen, a retired sub-lieutenant, during his spare time. The officers' journal (Bulletin de la réunion des officiers) of August 1886 claimed that the game gives a clear idea of the strategic maneuvers used by three cavalry brigades to cut the communication of a member of the army.
It is easy to create new combinatorial games but more difficult to predict those that will intere... more It is easy to create new combinatorial games but more difficult to predict those that will interest human players. We examine the concept of game quality, its automated measurement through self-play simulations, and its use in the evolutionary search for new high-quality games. A general game system called Ludi is described and experiments conducted to test its ability to synthesize and evaluate new games. Results demonstrate the validity of the approach through the automated creation of novel, interesting, and publishable games.
In this paper we present a process for automatically generating manuals for board games within th... more In this paper we present a process for automatically generating manuals for board games within the Ludii general game system. This process requires many different sub-tasks to be addressed, such as English translation of Ludii game descriptions, move visualisation, highlighting winning moves, strategy explanation, among others. These aspects are then combined to create a full manual for any given game. This manual is intended to provide a more intuitive explanation of a game's rules and mechanics, particularly for players who are less familiar with the Ludii game description language and grammar.
There are several different game description languages (GDLs), each intended to allow wide ranges... more There are several different game description languages (GDLs), each intended to allow wide ranges of arbitrary games (i.e., general games) to be described in a single higher-level language than general-purpose programming languages. Games described in such formats can subsequently be presented as challenges for automated general game playing agents, which are expected to be capable of playing any arbitrary game described in such a language without prior knowledge about the games to be played. The language used by the Ludii general game system was previously shown to be capable of representing equivalent games for any arbitrary, finite, deterministic, fully observable extensive-form game. In this paper, we prove its universality by extending this to include finite nondeterministic and imperfect-information games.
Game boards are described in the Ludii general game system by their underlying graphs, based on t... more Game boards are described in the Ludii general game system by their underlying graphs, based on tiling, shape and graph operators, with the automatic detection of important properties such as topological relationships between graph elements, directions and radial step sequences. This approach allows most conceivable game boards to be described simply and succinctly.
Combinations of Monte-Carlo tree search and Deep Neural Networks, trained through self-play, have... more Combinations of Monte-Carlo tree search and Deep Neural Networks, trained through self-play, have produced state-of-the-art results for automated game-playing in many board games. The training and search algorithms are not gamespecific, but every individual game that these approaches are applied to still requires domain knowledge for the implementation of the game's rules, and constructing the neural network's architecture -in particular the shapes of its input and output tensors. Ludii is a general game system that already contains over 1,000 different games, which can rapidly grow thanks to its powerful and user-friendly game description language. Polygames is a framework with training and search algorithms, which has already produced superhuman players for several board games. This paper describes the implementation of a bridge between Ludii and Polygames, which enables Polygames to train and evaluate models for games that are implemented and run through Ludii. We do not require any game-specific domain knowledge anymore, and instead leverage our domain knowledge of the Ludii system and its abstract state and move representations to write functions that can automatically determine the appropriate shapes for input and output tensors for any game implemented in Ludii. We describe experimental results for short training runs in a wide variety of different board games, and discuss several open problems and avenues for future research.
This paper proposes a new game-search algorithm, PN-MCTS, which combines Monte-Carlo Tree Search ... more This paper proposes a new game-search algorithm, PN-MCTS, which combines Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and Proof-Number Search (PNS). These two algorithms have been successfully applied for decision making in a range of domains. We define three areas where the additional knowledge provided by the proof and disproof numbers gathered in MCTS trees might be used: final move selection, solving subtrees, and the UCB1 selection mechanism. We test all possible combinations on different time settings, playing against vanilla UCT on several games: Lines of Action (7×7 and 8×8 board sizes), MiniShogi, Knightthrough, and Awari. Furthermore, we extend this new algorithm to properly address games with draws, like Awari, by adding an additional layer of PNS on top of the MCTS tree. The experiments show that PN-MCTS is able to outperform MCTS in all tested game domains, achieving win rates up to 96.2% for Lines of Action.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jul 1, 2019
Bien que les systèmes actuels de General Game Playing (GGP) facilitent la recherche en Intelligen... more Bien que les systèmes actuels de General Game Playing (GGP) facilitent la recherche en Intelligence Artificielle (IA) autour des jeux, ils sont souvent trop spécialisés et fournissent une capacité de calcul trop faible. Cet article décrit une première version du système ludémique de GGP dénommé LUDII qui apporte un outil efficace à la recherche en IA tout autant qu'aux concepteurs de jeux ou aux historiens mais aussi dans bien d'autres domaines. LUDII définit les jeux comme des arbres de ludèmes, correspondant à des concepts et mécanismes de jeu de haut niveau et facilement interprétables. Nous établissons les bases de LUDII en analysant ses principaux avantages : généralité, extensibilité, compréhensibilité et efficacité. Expérimentalement, LUDII surpasse l'un des plus performants raisonneurs décrit avec le General Game Description Language (GDL), basé sur un réseau de propositions (propnet), pour tous les jeux disponibles sur le serveur GGP.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 10, 2020
This technical report outlines the fundamental workings of the game logic behind Ludii, a general... more This technical report outlines the fundamental workings of the game logic behind Ludii, a general game system, that can be used to play a wide variety of games. Ludii is a program developed for the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project, in which mathematical and computational approaches are used to study how games were played, and spread, throughout history. This report explains how general game states and equipment are represented in Ludii, and how the rule ludemes dictating play are implemented behind the scenes, giving some insight into the core game logic behind the Ludii general game player. This guide is intended to help game designers using the Ludii game description language to understand it more completely and make fuller use of its features when describing their games.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Aug 29, 2020
While current General Game Playing (GGP) systems facilitate useful research in Artificial Intelli... more While current General Game Playing (GGP) systems facilitate useful research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game-playing, they are often somewhat specialized and computationally inefficient. In this paper, we describe an initial version of a "ludemic" general game system called Ludii, which has the potential to provide an efficient tool for AI researchers as well game designers, historians, educators and practitioners in related fields. Ludii defines games as structures of ludemes, i.e. highlevel, easily understandable game concepts. We establish the foundations of Ludii by outlining its main benefits: generality, extensibility, understandability and efficiency. Experimentally, Ludii outperforms one of the most efficient Game Description Language (GDL) reasoners, based on a propositional network, for all available games in the Tiltyard GGP repository.
This paper presents a general approach for measuring distances between board games within the Lud... more This paper presents a general approach for measuring distances between board games within the Ludii general game system. These distances are calculated using a previously published set of general board game concepts, each of which represents a common game idea or shared property. Our results compare and contrast two different measures of distance, highlighting the subjective nature of such metrics and discussing the different ways that they can be interpreted.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Aug 20, 2019
Ludii is a general game system being developed as part of the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project (... more Ludii is a general game system being developed as part of the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project (DLP). While its primary aim is to model, play, and analyse the full range of traditional strategy games, Ludii also has the potential to support a wide range of AI research topics and competitions. This paper describes some of the future competitions and challenges that we intend to run using the Ludii system, highlighting some of its most important aspects that can potentially lead to many algorithm improvements and new avenues of research. We compare and contrast our proposed competition motivations, goals and frameworks against those of existing general game playing competitions, addressing the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.
In many board games and other abstract games, patterns have been used as features that can guide ... more In many board games and other abstract games, patterns have been used as features that can guide automated game-playing agents. Such patterns or features often represent particular configurations of pieces, empty positions, etc., which may be relevant for a game's strategies. Their use has been particularly prevalent in the game of Go, but also many other games used as benchmarks for AI research. Simple, linear policies of such features are unlikely to produce state-of-the-art playing strength like the deep neural networks that have been more commonly used in recent years do. However, they typically require significantly fewer resources to train, which is paramount for large-scale studies of hundreds to thousands of distinct games. In this paper, we formulate a design and efficient implementation of spatial state-action features for general games. These are patterns that can be trained to incentivise or disincentivise actions based on whether or not they match variables of the state in a local area around action variables. We provide extensive details on several design and implementation choices, with a primary focus on achieving a high degree of generality to support a wide variety of different games using different board geometries or other graphs. Secondly, we propose an efficient approach for evaluating active features for any given set of features. In this approach, we take inspiration from heuristics used in problems such as SAT to optimise the order in which parts of patterns are matched and prune unnecessary evaluations. An empirical evaluation on 33 distinct games in the Ludii general game system demonstrates the efficiency of this approach in comparison to a naive baseline, as well as a baseline based on prefix trees.
Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), Aug 11, 2019
People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the ... more People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Apr 23, 2019
People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the ... more People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:
People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the ... more People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:
Ludii is a new general game system, currently under development, which aims to support a wider ra... more Ludii is a new general game system, currently under development, which aims to support a wider range of games than existing systems and approaches. It is being developed primarily for the task of game design, but o↵ers a number of other potential benefits for game and AI researchers, professionals and hobbyists. This paper is based on an interactive demonstration of Ludii at thuis year's Advances in Computer Games conference (ACG 2019). It describes the approach behind Ludii, how it works, how it is used, and what it can potentially do.
Humans tend to learn complex abstract concepts faster if examples are presented in a structured m... more Humans tend to learn complex abstract concepts faster if examples are presented in a structured manner. For instance, when learning how to play a board game, usually one of the first concepts learned is how the game ends, i.e. the actions that lead to a terminal state (win, lose or draw). The advantage of learning end-games first is that once the actions which lead to a terminal state are understood, it becomes possible to incrementally learn the consequences of actions that are further away from a terminal state-we call this an end-game-first curriculum. Currently the state-of-the-art machine learning player for general board games, AlphaZero by Google DeepMind, does not employ a structured training curriculum; instead learning from the entire game at all times. By employing an end-game-first training curriculum to train an AlphaZero inspired player, we empirically show that the rate of learning of an artificial player can be improved when compared to a player not using a training curriculum.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Apr 13, 2021
The French Military Game was described and analyzed for the first time by Édouard Lucas (1842-189... more The French Military Game was described and analyzed for the first time by Édouard Lucas (1842-1891), in an article published in 1887 in La Nature. According to him, the Military Game was in vogue in the military circles at that time, since the game was designed by Louis Dyen, a retired sub-lieutenant, during his spare time. The officers' journal (Bulletin de la réunion des officiers) of August 1886 claimed that the game gives a clear idea of the strategic maneuvers used by three cavalry brigades to cut the communication of a member of the army.
Digital Archaeoludology (DAL) is a new field of study involving the analysis and reconstruction o... more Digital Archaeoludology (DAL) is a new field of study involving the analysis and reconstruction of ancient games from incomplete descriptions and archaeological evidence using modern computational techniques. The aim is to provide digital tools and methods to help game historians and other researchers better understand traditional games, their development throughout recorded human history, and their relationship to the development of human culture and mathematical knowledge. This work is being explored in the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project. The aim of this inaugural international research meeting on DAL is to gather together leading experts in relevant disciplines-computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational phylogenetics, mathematics, history, archaeology, anthropology, etc.-to discuss the key themes and establish the foundations for this new field of research, so that it may continue beyond the lifetime of its initiating project.
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