Improving Chinese checkers performance

This is another post on improving the performance of game simulations by modifying the GDL by hand. Today, we look at chineseCheckers4, a game known for its particularly poor performance, especially for propnets.

Arithmetic in GDL

As a rather minimalist language, GDL doesn't have any native support for arithmetic. This hasn't stopped games from making use of arithmetic as needed.

The Dresden server, plus rewriting Othello

I recently found that the Dresden server is up and capable of hosting round-robin matches again. (It doesn't have a hostname at the moment, and I don't want to link directly to an IP address, so reach it via the first link on this page.)

The Dresden server is different from Tiltyard in that it has a wider variety of games, somewhat less curated than Tiltyard's selection in terms of the GDL and ease of processing the game descriptions. Unlike Tiltyard, Dresden will have gamers play pretty much every game it has.

Rewriting checkers

I had a suspicion a while back that some GDL games were poorly written in terms of performance, and could be improved upon. Recently, I was looking over the checkers rules and decided they would be a good test case for this treatment.

A quick guide to GDL terminology

I'm writing another post which is pretty heavy on the GDL terminology. I may not have the time to make every such post readable for someone who doesn't know a sentence from a term. Hopefully, this will also be of use to anyone trying to sort out the Gdl classes in GGP-Base.

What is a propnet?

Propositional networks, or propnets, are an alternative way of expressing the rules of a game, covered in Stanford's CS 227B course.

Writing a game with GDL: Sim

I described the Game Description Language in an earlier post, but didn't show an example of a complete game description in practice. Today, I'll write a new game and record the process I use to make sure it's correct.

The game I'll write today is Sim, a simple graph coloring game I found on Wikipedia.