Sancho gets a blog

Steve Draper and Andrew Rose have put together a blog describing their work on their (very good) general game player, Sancho. Sancho is the successor to Quixote, the winner of the first MOOC iteration of Stanford's General Game Playing class.

I fully expect their blog will update more frequently than mine.

The Annotated Tic-Tac-Toe

Tic-tac-toe is a classic and widely-understood game. Introductions to GDL typically use it as a sample "first game", as the rules are fairly simple and usually already known by the reader. However, the GDL representation can still be foreign enough to be difficult to understand. This post is my attempt to flesh it out with explanations of what each component of the rules is doing. This isn't my first attempt at an introduction to GDL, but different people will find different approaches better.

The General Game Playing Forum

Just a short note and link: There is now a long-term forum for discussion of General Game Playing, born from the discussions out of the GGP Coursera course last fall. (Speaking of which, a new session is starting right now.)

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.