Regular Boardgames
This work provides a more efficient and expressive language for researchers and developers in General Game Playing, particularly for board games, though it is incremental as it builds on existing GGP concepts.
The authors introduced Regular Boardgames (RBG), a new General Game Playing language based on regular languages, aiming to combine expressiveness, efficiency, and naturalness to address limitations in existing formalisms, and demonstrated its effectiveness in encoding and playing complex games like amazons and chess variants.
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).