Ludii -- The Ludemic General Game System
This provides an efficient tool for AI researchers, game designers, historians, educators, and practitioners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing GGP concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of specialized and inefficient General Game Playing (GGP) systems by introducing Ludii, a ludemic general game system that outperforms a leading GDL reasoner in all tested games and is competitive with the RBG system in performance.
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.