Ludii -- The Ludemic General Game System

While current General Game Playing (GGP) systems facilitate useful research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game-playing, they are often somewhat specialised and computationally inefficient. In this paper, we describe the "ludemic" general game system Ludii, which has the potential to provide an efficient tool for AI researchers as well as game designers, historians, educators and practitioners in related fields. Ludii defines games as structures of ludemes -- high-level, easily understandable game concepts -- which allows for concise and human-understandable game descriptions. We formally describe Ludii and outline 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, in all games available in the Tiltyard GGP repository. Moreover, Ludii is also competitive in terms of performance with the more recently proposed Regular Boardgames (RBG) system, and has various advantages in qualitative aspects such as generality.Comment: Accepted at ECAI 202

Regular Boardgames

We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) language called Regular Boardgames (RBG), which is based on the theory of regular languages. The objective of RBG is to join key properties as expressiveness, efficiency, and naturalness of the description in one GGP formalism, compensating certain drawbacks of the existing languages. This often makes RBG more suitable for various research and practical developments in GGP. While dedicated mostly for describing board games, RBG is universal for the class of all finite deterministic turn-based games with perfect information. We establish foundations of RBG, and analyze it theoretically and experimentally, focusing on the efficiency of reasoning. Regular Boardgames is the first GGP language that allows efficient encoding and playing games with complex rules and with large branching factor (e.g.\ amazons, arimaa, large chess variants, go, international checkers, paper soccer).Comment: AAAI 201

Agent Based Gameplaying System

Tato práce se zabývá universálními agentními systémy pro hraní her. Oproti běžným agentům, kteří jsou určeni pouze pro určitý druh činnosti nebo konkrétní hru, universální agent musí být schopen hrát prakticky libovolnou hru popsanou ve formálním deklarativním jazyce. Výzvou je především to, že pravidla hry nejsou předem známa, což znemožňuje použití některých optimalizací nebo vytvoření dobré heuristické funkce. Práce je rozdělena na teoretickou a praktickou část. První část představuje oblast univerzálních herních agentů, definuje jazyk GDL pro popis pravidel her a zabývá se vytvářením heuristických funkcí a jejich aplikací v algoritmu Monte Carlo stromové hledání. V praktické části je představen obecný způsob, jak vytvořit novou heuristickou funkci, která je poté integrována do vlastního herního agenta a ten je pak porovnán s dalšími existujícími systémy.This thesis deals with general game playing agent systems. On the contrary with common agents, which are designed only for a specified task or a game, general game playing agents have to be able to play basically any arbitrary game described in a formal declarative language. The biggest challenge is that the game rules are not known beforehand, which makes it impossible to use some optimizations or to make a good heuristic function. The thesis consists of a theoretical and a practical part. The first part introduces the field of general game playing agents, defines the Game Description Language and covers construction of heuristic evaluation functions and their integration within the Monte Carlo tree search algorithm. In the practical part, a general method of creating a new heuristic function is presented, which is later integrated into a proper agent, which is compared then with other systems.

Recent Advances in General Game Playing

The goal of General Game Playing (GGP) has been to develop computer programs that can perform well across various game types. It is natural for human game players to transfer knowledge from games they already know how to play to other similar games. GGP research attempts to design systems that work well across different game types, including unknown new games. In this review, we present a survey of recent advances (2011 to 2014) in GGP for both traditional games and video games. It is notable that research on GGP has been expanding into modern video games. Monte-Carlo Tree Search and its enhancements have been the most influential techniques in GGP for both research domains. Additionally, international competitions have become important events that promote and increase GGP research. Recently, a video GGP competition was launched. In this survey, we review recent progress in the most challenging research areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) related to universal game playing

Expectations, reality and perspectives in using bim for the green building design

In the late 1970s when the first programs for building energy consumption simulation appeared, architectural practice was based on paper documentation and 2D drafting programs were considered as state of the art technologies. The requirement for 3D building models for computer-based energy simulation minimized the use of this technology in everyday practice. With the appearance of BIM applications that enable creation of information rich 3D building models, everyone expected that this technology can easily provide all data necessary for energy consumption simulation. Today, the market is full of different BIM related applications that are advertised as solutions for the green building design. The paper gives an overview of energy consumption simulation tools and their connection to two BIM applications - ArchiCAD and Revit and demonstrates that recent development of both technologies does not fully meet expectations. The paper indicates means to avoid overoptimistic expectations from software tools that can help designers to achieve better comprehension of the real merits that BIM can bring to green building design. The paper addresses usability of using BIM for sustainable refurbishment. The paper concludes with the analysis of the Semantic Web technologies which can contribute to a better understanding of simulation results, and can provide more information about energy efficiency of the components used in BIM applications' libraries

Expectations, reality and perspectives in using bim for the green building design

In the late 1970s when the first programs for building energy consumption simulation appeared, architectural practice was based on paper documentation and 2D drafting programs were considered as state of the art technologies. The requirement for 3D building models for computer-based energy simulation minimized the use of this technology in everyday practice. With the appearance of BIM applications that enable creation of information rich 3D building models, everyone expected that this technology can easily provide all data necessary for energy consumption simulation. Today, the market is full of different BIM related applications that are advertised as solutions for the green building design. The paper gives an overview of energy consumption simulation tools and their connection to two BIM applications - ArchiCAD and Revit and demonstrates that recent development of both technologies does not fully meet expectations. The paper indicates means to avoid overoptimistic expectations from software tools that can help designers to achieve better comprehension of the real merits that BIM can bring to green building design. The paper addresses usability of using BIM for sustainable refurbishment. The paper concludes with the analysis of the Semantic Web technologies which can contribute to a better understanding of simulation results, and can provide more information about energy efficiency of the components used in BIM applications' libraries

A Reference Model Catalog of Models for Business Process Analysis

When results of business processes cannot be measured, the application of numeric Key Performance Indicators fails. Process performance cannot easily be analyzed unless other indirect indicators are applied. So, other existing models for process analysis containing convenient solutions and indicators have to be assessed and validated in order to use them to sufficiently assess business processes. In this article, various existing models were reviewed in an empirical investigation, categorized in systems and put into context to relevant theories. The result of the research is a Reference Model Catalog of Models for Business Process Analysis that also incorporates indirect process performance aspects like soft goals, complexity, maturity or dependencies. It is enabling enterprises and researchers to select a convenient process analysis model for their specific performance problem. Moreover, it is offering a comprehensive overview of models and visualizes correlative voids in their scope

LUDII - Le Système Ludémique de General Game Playing

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