Authors: Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Matthew Stephenson, Chiara F. Sironi, Mark H.M. Winands, Cameron Browne

Venue: 2020 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)

Year: 2020

Type: Conference article

Pages: 411–418

Publisher: IOS Press

Links: PDF · Ludii project website

While current General Game Playing (GGP) systems facilitate useful research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game-playing, they are often somewhat specialised and computationally inefficient. In this paper, we describe the ?ludemic? general game system Ludii, which has the potential to provide an efficient tool for AI researchers as well as game designers, historians, educators and practitioners in related fields. Ludii defines games as structures of ludemes — high-level, easily understandable game concepts — which allows for concise and human-understandable game descriptions. We formally describe Ludii and outline its main benefits: generality, extensibility, understandability and efficiency. Experimentally, Ludii outperforms one of the most efficient Game Description Language (GDL) reasoners, based on a propositional network, in all games available in the Tiltyard GGP repository. Moreover, Ludii is also competitive in terms of performance with the more recently proposed Regular Boardgames (RBG) system, and has various advantages in qualitative aspects such as generality.

Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Matthew Stephenson, Chiara F. Sironi, Mark H.M. Winands, and Cameron Browne (2020). Ludii - The Ludemic General Game System. In Giacomo, G. D., Catala, A., Dilkina, B., Milano, M., Barro, S., Bugarín, A., and Lang, J., editors, 2020 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 325 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, pp. 411–418. IOS Press.

@inproceedings{piette2020ludii,
  author    = {Éric Piette and Dennis J.N.J. Soemers and Matthew Stephenson and Chiara F. Sironi and Mark H.M. Winands and Cameron Browne},
  title     = {Ludii - The Ludemic General Game System},
  booktitle = {2020 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  series    = {Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications},
  volume    = {325},
  pages     = {411--418},
  year      = {2020},
  publisher = {IOS Press}
}

This publication is one of the key references for the Ludii project, which occupies a central place in my broader research trajectory. It is also one of the publications that best illustrates the link between general game systems, Artificial Intelligence, and the wider computational study of games.