If Parties Are Battles, What Are We? Practising Collectivity in Memory Work

Memory-work ConferenceMemory-work was original devised by Haug and others (1987) who explained the method to an English speaking audience in Female Sexualization: A collective work of memory. In this paper, I consider the rationale for and the explanation of the “collective subject” in memory-work. Undertaking memory-work can involve a tension between exploring and eliding difference in the group. However, the implications of Haug’s particular understanding of collective subjectivity are an overemphasis on identifying commonalties between group members’ positions and ideas, at the expense of interrogating difference. Adopting Haug’s approach to collective subjectivity entails the risk that persistent divisions between people will be understood in terms of individual ignorance or personal instabilities. I propose an anti-foundational understanding of collective subjectivity (Butler, 1992). This doesn’t mean negating the importance of collectivity. Neither does it mean assuming that it will emerge, nor explaining its absence in terms of the group’s or an individual’s failure. Rather, an anti-foundationalist approach involves questioning the emergence of collective subjectivity. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of my discussion of collective subjectivity for analysing the discussions produced in memory-work

Learning Policies from Self-Play with Policy Gradients and MCTS Value Estimates

In recent years, state-of-the-art game-playing agents often involve policies that are trained in self-playing processes where Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithms and trained policies iteratively improve each other. The strongest results have been obtained when policies are trained to mimic the search behaviour of MCTS by minimising a cross-entropy loss. Because MCTS, by design, includes an element of exploration, policies trained in this manner are also likely to exhibit a similar extent of exploration. In this paper, we are interested in learning policies for a project with future goals including the extraction of interpretable strategies, rather than state-of-the-art game-playing performance. For these goals, we argue that such an extent of exploration is undesirable, and we propose a novel objective function for training policies that are not exploratory. We derive a policy gradient expression for maximising this objective function, which can be estimated using MCTS value estimates, rather than MCTS visit counts. We empirically evaluate various properties of resulting policies, in a variety of board games.Comment: Accepted at the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 201

Less is More: Reflections on the Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Reports

This Topical Issue is based upon a submission to the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) review of the Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Reports

Demons of Discord: Violence and the Socio-political Growth of Colonial South Carolina and Georgia, 1690-1776

Life in the colonial American south was filled with brutality and inequality. Whether it was the violence of slavery and colonial expansion or the inherent inequalities of gender relations, violence and oppression permeated nearly every facet of life. This dissertation will look critically at the development of what I am calling a culture of violence in the colonies of Georgia and South Carolina. By studying the ways in which violence effected family, social, and political interactions, my work argues that the crucible of social, racial, and political issues of these two colonies created a culture in which violence or the threat of violence permeated most human interactions. Not only was violence commonplace, violence perpetrated by the individual as well as the state came to be seen as the only legitimate way to punish someone or defend oneself. Social and political historians have dealt with one or two of spheres in which violence occurred. For instance, many studies focus on the violence of slavery and gender relations. However, no one has yet attempted to view all the forms of violence in the South and use that as a lens for understanding southern culture both in the Colonial era and beyond. I argue that by investigating all forms of brutality and the rhetoric associated with such acts, a more complete picture of southern culture emerges – a culture which did not just accept brutality in one area of society but rather in every aspect of life. This acceptance of the necessity of violence went on to inform southerners’ responses to the Imperial Crisis, American Revolution, and even the racial upheaval of the post-Civil War Years

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