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

An Empirical Evaluation of Two General Game Systems: Ludii and RBG

Although General Game Playing (GGP) systems can facilitate useful research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for gameplaying, they are often computationally inefficient and somewhat specialised to a specific class of games. However, since the start of this year, two General Game Systems have emerged that provide efficient alternatives to the academic state of the art the Game Description Language (GDL). In order of publication, these are the Regular Boardgames language (RBG), and the Ludii system. This paper offers an experimental evaluation of Ludii. Here, we focus mainly on a comparison between the two new systems in terms of two key properties for any GGP system: simplicity/clarity (e.g. human-readability), and efficiency

Evolutionary Tabletop Game Design: A Case Study in the Risk Game

Creating and evaluating games manually is an arduous and laborious task. Procedural content generation can aid by creating game artifacts, but usually not an entire game. Evolutionary game design, which combines evolutionary algorithms with automated playtesting, has been used to create novel board games with simple equipment; however, the original approach does not include complex tabletop games with dice, cards, and maps. This work proposes an extension of the approach for tabletop games, evaluating the process by generating variants of Risk, a military strategy game where players must conquer map territories to win. We achieved this using a genetic algorithm to evolve the chosen parameters, as well as a rules-based agent to test the games and a variety of quality criteria to evaluate the new variations generated. Our results show the creation of new variations of the original game with smaller maps, resulting in shorter matches. Also, the variants produce more balanced matches, maintaining the usual drama. We also identified limitations in the process, where, in many cases, where the objective function was correctly pursued, but the generated games were nearly trivial. This work paves the way towards promising research regarding the use of evolutionary game design beyond classic board games.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication at the XXII Braziliam Simposium on Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames 2023

Evaluating the Effects on Monte Carlo Tree Search of Predicting Co-operative Agent Behaviour

This thesis explores the effects of including an agent-modelling strategy into Monte-Carlo Tree Search. This is to explore how the effects of such modelling might be used to increase the performance of agents in co-operative environments such as games. The research is conducted using two applications. The first is a co-operative 2-player puzzle game in which a perfect model outperforms an agent that makes the assumption the other agent plays randomly. The second application is the partially observable co-operative card game Hanabi, in which the predictor variant is able to outperform both a standard variant of MCTS and a version that assumes a fixed-strategy for the paired agents. This thesis also investigates a technique for learning player strategies off-line based on saved game logs for use in modelling