Predicting Victories in Video Games - IEEE BigData 2021 Cup Report

We summarize the results of IEEE BigData 2021 Cup: Predicting Victories in Video Games - a data mining challenge organized at the KnowledgePit platform in association with the IEEE BigData 2021 conference. We describe the competition task, as well as the data acquisition and preprocessing steps. We also provide a brief overview of the top-performing solutions submitted by participants. Finally, we present results of the post-competition data analysis, in which we consider the similarity of solutions submitted by various teams in terms of their errors on the test data. We conclude this analysis by demonstrating a method for constructing an ensemble of submitted solutions. Such an ensemble performs better than any of the individual solutions submitted during the competition

A logic for reasoning about game descriptions

General game playing aims to develop autonomous computer players capable of playing any formally described games. The biggest challenge for such a player is to understand a game and acquire useful knowledge about the game from its description. This paper aims to develop a logical approach for reasoning about game rules. We introduce a modal logic with a sound and complete axiomatic system. The logic extends Zhang and Thielscher’s framework with two modalities to express game rules and reason about game outcomes. We use a well-known strategy game, Hex, to demonstrate how to use the logic to standardise game descriptions and verify properties of a game description

Behavioural equivalence of game descriptions

Game description language is a logical language designed for General Game Playing. The language is highly expressive so that, in theory, all finite-state games with perfect information and deterministic actions can be described. However, a game can be described in different ways and the way of description can dramatically affect behaviour of general game players. This paper investigates the relationships of game models and game descriptions. We first introduce the concept of submodel bisimulation to filter out unreachable states while maintain the nature of a game. We then define equivalence of game descriptions in the sense that two game descriptions are equivalent if the described games behaviourally the same. The concept of game equivalency, which breaks through logical equivalency, sets a boundary for reformulation of game descriptions. Finally we use a well-known strategy game, Hex Game, to demonstrate how to verify equivalence of game descriptions