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Player of Games

arxiv.org

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Re: Player of Games

#211

Post by mathgladiator »

captn3m0 wrote: post #7

If you are interested in this, I maintain a list of boardgame-solving related research at https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research , with sections for specific games. This looks really interesting. It would be a good project to test this against a general card-playing framework to easily test it on a variety of imperfect-information games based on playing cards.

Thanks for this! I'm currently designing a language for complex board games like Battlestar Galactica: http://www.adama-lang.org/

Something that I found amazing was inverting the flow control such that the server asks players questions with a list of possible choices simplifies the agent design tremendously. As I'm looking to retire to work on this project, I can generate the agent code and then hand-craft an AI. However, some AIs are soooo hard to even conceptualize.

Re: Player of Games

#212

Post by mathgladiator »

fho wrote: post #43
captn3m0 wrote: post #7

If you are interested in this, I maintain a list of boardgame-solving related research at https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research , with sections for specific games. This looks really interesting. It would be a good project to test this against a general card-playing framework to easily test it on a variety of imperfect-information games based on playing cards.

I tried my hand once or twice at (re-)implementing board games [0], so that I could run some common "AI" algorithms on the game trees. What tripped me up every time is that most board games have a lot of "if this happens, there is this specific rule that applies". Even relatively simple games (like Homeworlds) are pretty hard to nail down perfectly due to all the special cases. Do you, or somebody else, have any reco…

I'd appreciate you checking out my language and providing feedback. An element that helps is building a stateful server and using streams where the people behave like servers:

http://www.adama-lang.org/

Re: Player of Games

#213

Post by mathgladiator »

penteract wrote: post #120
captn3m0 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to boardgame.io. It provides very good abstractions for turns, phases, players, and partial information. I’ve implemented small games with a few hours of effort, and that includes a UI.

It's a good set of abstractions, but I've found that the system used for immutability (immerjs) carries noticable performance costs (a factor of more than 2), to the point that it was faster to make a mutable copy of almost all the gamestate at the start of the 'apply move' code.

For Adama ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ), I am using a mutable tree with two copies and then built transactions such that I can emit deltas on the parts that change. I have all the benefits of immutability without the cost PLUS I have a cheap undo/redo log.

Re: Player of Games

#214

Post by mathgladiator »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #195
fho wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried my hand once or twice at (re-)implementing board games [0], so that I could run some common "AI" algorithms on the game trees. What tripped me up every time is that most board games have a lot of "if this happens, there is this specific rule that applies". Even relatively simple games (like Homeworlds) are pretty hard to nail down perfectly due to all the special cases. Do you, or somebody else, have any reco…

> What tripped me up every time is that most board games have a lot of "if this happens, there is this specific rule that applies". Even relatively simple games (like Homeworlds) are pretty hard to nail down perfectly due to all the special cases. The key is to build a data-driven state machine, rather than writing logic with a bunch of 'if' statements.

You are correct, but some games can yield exceptionally complicated state machines.

I designed a language for solving this: http://www.adama-lang.org/

I get all the benefits of a data driven state machine with the simplicity of a language that supports asynchronously asking users for updates.

Re: Player of Games

#215

Post by mbrodersen »

mudlus wrote: post #69

Yawn, show me a computer that game make fun games

Yes indeed. AI research will only take a real step forward when it learns how to be creative instead of just very good at optimising simple formal systems like board games.

Re: Player of Games

#216

Post by dontreact »

tsbinz wrote: post #174
ShamelessC wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first mention says "Stockfish 8, level 20" in the paper. This isn't a blog post that you can skim, you need to read the whole thing before critiquing.

I obviously read it, otherwise I wouldn't have known which version they are using. They are banking on others, that do just skim the figures and tables, not noticing their usage of outdated baselines.

I honestly don’t care what version of stockfish they used and neither does most of their intended audience, for the reasons I stated.

Re: Player of Games

#217

Post by 314 »

sjg1729 wrote: post #26
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allusions are fun and all, but I disagree. These are important problems that a lot of people have put their whole careers into researching. Silly names like these lack gravitas.

Always sad to see these projects suffer from A Shortfall of Gravitas

Indeed they would do well To Consider The Lack Of Gravitas.

Re: Player of Games

#218

Post by baq »

7thaccount wrote: post #148
WJW wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last page of the book gives it away: (MASSIVE SPOILER OBV) The security drone who came with Gurgeh to Azad was the same drone he meets during the introduction chapters who was "rejected" from SC and offers to let him cheat (though it was wearing a disguise at the time). Then, after he cheats he basically gets blackmailed into going to Azad and conveniently this "non-SC" drone comes with him in a very "non-SC" shi…

Yes, at the end you start to question just who the player of games actually was.

that was a beautiful feeling after completing the book: who has been played here? i, the reader, certainly was.

Re: Player of Games

#220

Post by randomswede »

hesperiidae wrote: post #183
joshuamorton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recollection is that by the end of the novel its clear that Gurgeh was never competitive with the ship, although he might have been competitive with his security drone (although even that isn't clear, since imply that the security drone is a better game player than it pretends to be). To me it felt like the whole point of the novel was that Gurgeh was a piece in an even larger game and he didn't even realize it. S…

I agree with you that Gurgeh was just a piece getting manipulated and that that was the point, but Gurgeh was still the best piece that they could use for the job. The Culture is (in this story) pretty much only bound by their own constraints. They chose Gurgeh for the role, since he had enough skill and talent to actually be able to accomplish the Culture's (or the SC's, winkwink ) objectives without having the whol…

A non-drone player was necessary, as Azad would never have acknowledged defeat by a drone. But, defeat by a human accomplished the Culture's goal and Gurgeh was the best bet (or at least the best available one) on the desired outcome.

I see their selection as mostly being about Gurgeh having enough pride to accept the small cheat, coupled with enough skill to not actually need the AI assistance. It's been a while since I read TPoG last, but my recollection is that there were a handful of players at essentially the same level as Gurgeh and from a pure skill and intuition level, I suspect any of them would have worked, but only Gurgeh fell for the entrapment.

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