Technical reports

Logic programming for general game-playing

Barney Pell

June 1993, 15 pages

DOI: 10.48456/tr-302

Abstract

Meta-Game Playing is a new approach to games in Artificial Intelligence, where we construct programs to play new games in a well-defined class, which are output by an automatic game generator. As the specific games to be played are not known in advance, a degree of human bias is eliminated, and playing programs are required to perform any game-specific optimisations without human assistance.

The attempt to construct a general game-playing program is made difficult by the opposing goals of generality and efficiency. This paper shows how application of standard techniques in logic-programming (abstract interpretation and partial evaluation) makes it possible to achieve both of these goals. Using these techniques, we can represent the semantics of a large class of games in a general and declarative way, but then have the program transform this representation into a more efficient version once it is presented with the rules of a new game. This process can be viewed as moving some of the responsibility for game analysis (that concerned with efficiency) from the researcher to the program itself.

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-302,
  author =	 {Pell, Barney},
  title = 	 {{Logic programming for general game-playing}},
  year = 	 1993,
  month = 	 jun,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-302.ps.gz},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-302},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-302}
}