Report on the 2nd Digital Ludeme Project Workshop

Abstract

The 2 nd Digital Ludeme Project (DLP) Workshop, on the topic of Game AI Applications for Historical Games Research, was held at Maastricht University's Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering (DKE) over 11-14 April 2022. The aims of this workshop were twofold: 1. To bring together experts on both the historical/cultural study of games as well as the computational study of games and Game AI, in order to foster discussion and the exchange of ideas between fields that do not often meet. 2. To educate participants in the use of the Ludii general game system (Piette et al. ( 2020)) through lectures and practical hands-on tutorials, and solicit feedback on what functionality might be added to Ludii to increase its usefulness for practioners in the field.This workshop follows on from the earlier 1 st DLP Workshop on the topic of Foundations of Digital Archaeoludology (DAL) held at the Leibniz Centre, Schloss Dagstuhl, Saarbrücken, Germany, over 10-12 April 2019 (Browne et al. ( 2019)). The 1 st DLP Workshop was attended by 17 participants.The 2 nd DLP Workshop was held as a hybrid event due to Covid restrictions and travel difficulties, although most participants attended in person (see Fig. 1). There were a total of 36 participants from 17 countries, and 32 talks (in addition to round table and open discussions) from 22 speakers including 14 × invited speakers, 5 × DLP team members and 3 × DKE Honours students. 1 Each day covered a broad theme split into four specialised sessions, as follows.

Learning state-action features for general game playing

“…Two other papers are under review, of which one at a conference, and one for publication in a high-impact journal. The conference publications have all been presented at their respective conferences, and parts of the research have also been presented at interdisciplinary workshops such as the 2 nd Digital Ludeme Project workshop (Browne et al, 2022a). The source code for all contributions has been made publicly available as part of the LUDII codebase.…”