Name: Playing Modern Board Games
You will learn: PDDL, General game playing, Videogame Definition Language, MTCS, Board games
Difficulty: moderate
Excitement: What it takes to create general player for board games? How to formalize board games?
Description: We are Homo Sapiens Sapiens Ludus; mankind invest a lot of time investigating games ... formal, computer, board games, oh my, how many games are there anyway? Well this thesis topic is exploratory. Let's choose 3-5 modern board games (yeah, not GO, not CHESS, ...) that differs in some key aspects (e.g. randomness/bluffing like Liar's Dice, board types (Völuspá, Terra Mystica), pure card games (Citadels), etc. (you can watch Dice tower folk talking about influential board games for inspiration). The target is to classify these games from the point of view of AI and try to describe them in some concrete formalism (like PDDL, GGP or VGDL).

The work has 4 parts:
  1. read about PDDL, GGP, VGDL
  2. choose a set of games to model,
  3. model the game in some formalism and construct AI for the game (text based!),
  4. use AI to play with real humans, gather feedback!
And of course we can discuss the theme and how to shape it to suit your taste - the ultimate holy grail goal is to be able to describe board games using some formal language and create a general AI for that!

Oh and be sure to check Machinations, formalization of game economy.

playing_boardgames.txt · Last modified: 2016/02/26 23:09 by jakub.gemrot