Regular Boardgames

Abstract

We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) language called Regular Boardgames (RBG), which is based on the theory of regular languages. The objective of RBG is to join key properties as expressiveness, efficiency, and naturalness of the description in one GGP formalism, compensating certain drawbacks of the existing languages. This often makes RBG more suitable for various research and practical developments in GGP. While dedicated mostly for describing board games, RBG is universal for the class of all finite deterministic turn-based games with perfect information. We establish foundations of RBG, and analyze it theoretically and experimentally, focusing on the efficiency of reasoning. Regular Boardgames is the first GGP language that allows efficient encoding and playing games with complex rules and with large branching factor (e.g. amazons, arimaa, large chess variants, go, international checkers, paper soccer). * Arimaa's perft was computed starting from a fixed chess-like position to skip the initial setup. † For tic-tac-toe, the whole game tree is computed in about a second, thus the test could not last enough time to provide reliable results.

An Empirical Evaluation of Two General Game Systems: Ludii and RBG

“…Recently, two alternatives to GDL have been proposed: the Regular Boardgames language (RBG) [12], and Ludii [13].…”

“…However, as the allowed expressions are simplistic and applied only to one piece at a time, it cannot express any non-standard behavior. RBG [12] extended and updated this idea to be able to describe the full range of deterministic board games.…”

“…The high level version can be converted to the low level version in order to provide the two main aspects of a GGP system: humanreadability and efficiency for AI programs. The technical syntax specification of RBG can be found in [15]. Thanks to this distinction between two languages, it is possible to model complex games (e.g.…”

“…As an example, Figure 1 presents a complete description of Amazons for the RBG system. RBG has been demonstrated to be universal for the class of finite deterministic games with full information, and more efficient than the state of the art using GDL [12].…”

Report on the Digital Ludeme Project

“…Ludii has been demonstrated to be competitive with other commonly-used general game systems, such as the ones based on Stanford's GDL (Love et al, 2008) or the Regular Boardgames language (Kowalski et al, 2019), in terms of computational efficiency (Piette et al, 2019a). Due to the succinctness of Ludii's game descriptions, and the close relationship between ludemes and human-understandable, high-level game concepts, it may also be argued that Ludii's game descriptions are easier to read and write.…”