Introduction

General game players are systems able to accept declarative descriptions of arbitrary games at runtime and able to use such descriptions to play those games effectively. Unlike specialized game players, such as Deep Blue, general game players cannot rely on algorithms designed in advance for specific games. General game playing expertise must depend on intelligence on the part of the game player and not just intelligence of the programmer of the game player. In order to perform well, general game players must incorporate various Artificial Intelligence technologies, such as knowledge representation, reasoning, learning, and rational decsion making; and these capabilities have to work together in integrated fashion.

While general game playing is a topic with inherent interest, work in this area has practical value as well. The underlying technology can be used in a variety of other application areas, such as business process management, electronic commerce, and military operations.

Competition

This year's GGP competition will be held in conjunction with this year's AAAI conference in Atlanta. The competition will consist of two phases. On Monday, July 12, players will participate in preliminary rounds. On Tuesday, July 13, the top four finishers from the preliminary rounds will participate in semifinal and final rounds to determine an overall winner. (Note that, unlike competitions in previous years, there will not be a competition phase prior to the conference.)

The competition is open to the public with the exception of affiliates of Stanford University. In order to participate, teams must register by June 30 by sending email to the organizers listed below. Participants should check this page periodically for updates.

To encourage participation, an entry fee will not be charged. Onsite competition participants will be admitted to the competition and exhibit areas but not to the technical or social events of the main conference. Finalists are encouraged to register for the AAAI-10 conference to attend research presentations and events relevant to the topics of the competition.

Registration

To register send an email to evancox@stanford.edu with your team name, members, and primary contact's email.

Results

The competition was organized into 4 stages, preliminary rounds, semifinals, quarterfinals, and finals. 11 teams participated in the preliminary round, with the top 8 performers advancing to the quarterfinals. The quarterfinals seeds were determined by overall score in the preliminary round. The quarterfinals and semifinals were played tournament style, with top seed matched against the bottom seed for the duration of the round

Congratulations to the winner of the competition Ary! The results of the semi-finals are as follows

1. Ary
2. Maligne
3. CadiaPlayer
4. FluxPlayer

The following teams advanced to the semi-finals as well

• Centurio
• Atax
• Turboturtle
• Gamer

The following teams did not advance past the preliminary round

• Tortoise
• Nex
• Gorgon

Competition Logistics

For the competition we will be hosting our own instance of the Dresden GGP server. Players should test on the current Dresden GGP server to make sure their code will work for the tournament. Additionally the server hosts nightly round robins, and would be a good way for testing in a competition setting.

We are allowing remote agents to participate in the comeptition. While it is not required that a representative of each team be physically present, it is highly desirable.

The instance of the Dresden server we will run will be running locally on my (Evan Cox's) laptop. If the internet connection provided by the hotel goes down for some reason we will continue the competition locally, without remote agents. If there is not a representative of the team present, and your code crashes or some other untoward error occurs, we will not wait for you to bring it back up. We will send your primary contact an email alerting them to the crash. If a representative is there in person we will be more lenient with bringing code back online.

Organizers

• Evan Cox
  Computer Science Department
  Stanford University
  Email: evancox@stanford.edu
  


• Michael Genesereth
  Computer Science Department
  Stanford University
  Email: genesereth@stanford.edu