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The General Game Playing Description Language Is Universal Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence The General Game Playing Description Language Is Universal Michael Thielscher∗ School of Computer Science and Engineering The University of New South Wales, Australia [email protected] Abstract GALA system (that for a given game specification created the game tree and then computed optimal strategies). Presum- The Game Description Language is a high-level, ably its tight coupling with a programming language (Prolog) rule-based formalisms for communicating the rules and its operational—rather than declarative—semantics pre- of arbitrary games to general game-playing sys- vented Gala from being adopted by others as a sufficiently tems, whose challenging task is to learn to play pre- system-independent domain specification language. viously unknown games without human interven- With GDL the organisers of the AAAI GGP Competition tion. Originally designed for deterministic games sought a high-level game specification language that admits with complete information about the game state, a purely declarative reading and thus allows general game- the language was recently extended to include ran- playing systems to reason about the rules of a game. In this domness and imperfect information. However, de- regard, GDL follows the tradition of AI Planning. Planning termining the extent to which this enhancement al- languages however describe a problem from the perspective lows to describe truly arbitrary games was left as an of a single agent, even in case of adversarial planning (see, open problem. We provide a positive answer to this e.g., [Jensen and Veloso, 2000]). GDL generalises this to question by relating the extended Game Descrip- the presence of other agents that have their own actions and tion Language to the universal, mathematical con- goals. Reasoning about the intentions of the other players is cept of extensive-form games, proving that indeed the basis for Opponent Modelling—one of the crucial aspects just any such game can be described faithfully. in which GGP goes beyond AI Planning [Genesereth et al., 2005]. On the other hand, GDL shares with existing plan- 1 Introduction ning languages the compactness of specifications so that, un- like with, say, graph-based, propositionalised encodings (see, A contemporary Grand AI Challenge, General Game Play- e.g., [Mura, 2000]), games of practical interest such as Chess ing (GGP) aims at building systems that learn to play previ- can be fully specified with just a few kilobytes of code. ously unknown games without human intervention and just Despite steady progress, the current state of the art in Gen- by being told the rules of a game [Genesereth et al., 2005]. eral Game Playing is limited to deterministic games with Broad interest in this challenge was sparked by the inaugu- complete information about the game state, owing to the ration of an annual AAAI GGP Competition in 2005, and restricted expressiveness of original GDL. In [Thielscher, in just a few years since then GGP has become an estab- 2010] we have defined a notationally simple extension to in- lished area in AI: An increasing number of research groups clude both randomness and imperfect information. A num- world-wide develop game-playing technology to build ac- ber of examples have showed how this enhanced GDL covers tual systems ([Clune, 2007; Schiffel and Thielscher, 2007; games with new features like partial observability, informa- Bjornsson¨ and Finnsson, 2009], just to mention a few); a se- tion asymmetry, and communicative actions. However, de- ries of biennial IJCAI workshops devoted to this topic started termining the extent to which this enhancement allows to de- in 2009; and AAAI’10 featured the first ever technical session scribe truly arbitrary (discretised, finite) games was left open. on GGP, contributing to a rapidly growing body of literature. In this paper, we provide a positive answer to this question A main reason for this success of the competition (besides by relating the extended Game Description Language to the the attractive $10,000 purse!) was the institution of the gen- universal, mathematical concept of extensive-form games. As eral Game Description Language (GDL) as the foundation for the main result we show the following. GGP [Genesereth et al., 2005]. A machine-processable lan- guage for specifying a wide range of games existed before— 1. The players’ information sets determined by a GDL de- GALA (for: Game Language) [Koller and Pfeffer, 1997], scription satisfy all standard requirements of informa- which however was never used outside of the context of the tion partitions in extensive-form games. ∗ The author is the recipient of an Australian Research Council 2. Any extensive-form game can be described faithfully Future Fellowship (project FT 0991348). (that is, move-by-move) in GDL. 1107 First and foremost, these results show that GDL can be con- logic programs are known to admit a unique standard model; sidered complete for the purpose of General Game Playing. see [Apt et al., 1987] for details. A further syntactic restric- But we also expect our result to be of interest beyond GGP, tion ensures that only finitely many positive instances are true because game models arise in many other AI disciplines, such in this model; for details we must refer to [Love et al., 2006]. as Multiagent Planning [Larbi et al., 2007] or Multiagent Sys- Finally, the special keywords are to be used as follows: tems in general. A universal, compact and purely declarative • role only appears in the head of facts; description language for games of any kind is potentially use- • ful wherever there is a need for concise, machine-processable init only appears as head of clauses and does not de- specifications of domains and applications as games. pend on any of true, legal, does, next, sees, The rest of the paper is organised as follows. In the next terminal, goal; section, we give a brief overview of the extended Game De- • true only appears in the body of clauses; scription Language, followed by recapitulating the formal • does only appears in the body of clauses and does not definition of extensive-form games from a standard textbook depend on any of legal, terminal, goal; [Rasmusen, 2007]. In the section that follows, we formally • next and sees only appear as head of clauses. map GDL game descriptions into games in extensive form. Thereafter we prove that, conversely, every extensive-form These restrictions are imposed to ensure that a set of GDL game can be described in the language. rules can be effectively and unambiguously interpreted by a state transition system as follows. To begin with, any 2 Preliminaries set of clauses G determines an implicit domain-dependent set of ground symbolic expressions Σ, like candidate, 2.1 Game Descriptions hide car(1), chosen(3), etc. Game positions (i.e., states) are Σ The purpose of the Game Description Language is to allow represented by subsets of since they are composed of in- for concise, high-level specifications of the rules of arbitrary dividual features, as in finite games. To this end, GDL uses a logic programming-like {closed(1), closed(2), closed(3), step(1)} (1) syntax and is characterised by the following special keywords. Although Σ itself is usually infinite, the syntactic restric- role(?r) ?r is a player tions in GDL guarantee that the set of roles, each reachable init(?f) ?f holds in the initial position state, and the set of legal moves are always finite subsets true(?f) ?f holds in the current position of Σ [Love et al., 2006]. legal(?r,?m) ?r can do move ?m Specifically, then, the derivable instances of role(?r) does(?r,?m) player ?r does move ?m define the players. The initial position, (1) in our example next(?f) ?f holds in the next position game, is composed of the derivable instances of init(?f). terminal the position is terminal In order to determine the legal moves of a player in any goal(?r,?v) ?r gets payoff ?v given state, this state has to be encoded first, using the key- sees(?r,?p) ?r perceives ?p in the next position word true. More precisely, let S = {f1,...,fk} be a random the random player (aka. Nature) finite state like (1), then G is extended by the k facts true def As an example, the rules in Fig. 1 describe a simple but fa- S = { true(f1)., ..., true(fk).} mous game where a car prize is hidden behind one of three Those instances of legal(?r,?m) that are derivable from doors and where a candidate is given two chances to pick a G ∪ Strue, e.g. legal(random, hide car(3)) given (1), de- door. Lines 1–7 introduce the players’ names and the state fine all legal moves ?m for role ?r in state S. In the same features that hold initially. The possible moves are speci- way, the clauses for terminal and goal define termina- fied by the rules with head legal (lines 9–21): first, the tion and goal values relative to the encoding of a position. random player must decide where to place the car and, si- Determining a position update and the percepts of the play- multaneously, the candidate chooses a door; next, random ers requires the encoding of the current position and of a joint opens a door that is not the one that holds the car nor the cho- move (i.e., one move from each player). Specifically, if play- sen one; finally, the candidate can either stick to his earlier ers r1,...,rn take moves a1,...,an, then let choice (noop) or switch to the other yet unopened door. does def The candidate’s only percept throughout the game, viz.
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