Thursday, December 1, 2016

2016 Tiltyard Open format

It's time to reveal the types of matches at this year's Tiltyard Open tournament. A few things have changed from last year, so use this as your guide to what's ahead.

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Alloy 0.10.0 graphical log streaming is live

You can now get some insight into what Alloy is thinking by watching a live graphical representation of its logs as it plays on Tiltyard.

I decided to do this primarily as a way to better understand my player and UCT. I had moved Alloy to run on a dedicated computer so it can run continuously, but this made it difficult to view information directly from the program. Streaming this publicly makes it easier to see regardless of where I am, and it also allows others to watch this information and gather their own insights about game AI.

By moving from a few lines of logging at a time to a full screen of graphical information, I can also afford to include a wider array of information useful for debugging or for understanding my player's weaknesses.

Friday, April 1, 2016

The GDL engine performance-testing framework

The Game Description Language is declarative, not imperative. It defines the rules of a game, but not the process by which a program should apply those rules to produce facts. This has led to a wide variety of implementations of GDL interpreters, or engines, that handle this computation, with a wide range in their speed and accuracy across games.

A paper presented at the GIGA'13 conference by Yngvi Björnsson and Stephan Schiffel compared the performance of six such engines on 12 games. (To access the paper, select "proceedings" on the conference website and scroll to page 55.) To follow up on this experiment, and to test my own creations, I decided to write an open-source framework for this type of performance testing.