The 2013 International General Game Playing Competition will be held in conjunction with the 2013 AAAI Conference in Bellevue, Washington, USA.

The format of the competition this year will be similar to that in previous years - one day of qualifying games to select eight finalists, followed by a day of double elimination play to determine a winner. Exact dates to be announced soon.

The specification for game description this year is essentially the same as in the past. One minor difference is the guarantee that all game descriptions will contain explicit axiomatizations of "base propositions" and "input propositions". See the Game Definition Language specification for details. This is additional information, and players can safely ignore it and still play successfully.

The communication protocol is also the same in all essential details. One difference this year is the addition of a new message type (called "preview"). See the Game Management overview for details. As with the base and input information in GDL, this message provides additional information and can safely be ignored.

One other difference this year is that there will be an emphasis on games with structure of various sorts. Many of the games will be factorable (i.e. divisible into independent subgames); some will have detectable symmetries (e.g. the 4-fold symmetry in the initial state of Tic Tac Toe); many will have other exploitable and detectable regularities (e.g. goals whose values increase monotonically as the game progresses). Sample games will be posted here soon. Like the other changes this year, these structures can be ignored. However, players who can recognize and exploit such structure are likely to be at an advantage over players that do not.

Finally, as in the past few years, there will be a Carbon vs Silicon contest at the end of the competition, pitting the new champion against a human in a best of 3 match.

The competition is open to the public with the exception of affiliates of Stanford University. If you are interested in participating in the Competition, please register your player by sending a note to genesereth@stanford.edu. See you in July.