General Board Game Concepts
This work addresses the problem of leveraging shared game aspects for AI and game design applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing GGP frameworks without claiming major breakthroughs.
The paper tackles the under-exploration of common ideas in General Game Playing for board games by formalizing 'game concepts' inspired by player and designer terms, using the Ludii system to describe concepts at various abstraction levels, which opens new research lines like hyper-agent selectors and AI learning transfer.
Many games often share common ideas or aspects between them, such as their rules, controls, or playing area. However, in the context of General Game Playing (GGP) for board games, this area remains under-explored. We propose to formalise the notion of "game concept", inspired by terms generally used by game players and designers. Through the Ludii General Game System, we describe concepts for several levels of abstraction, such as the game itself, the moves played, or the states reached. This new GGP feature associated with the ludeme representation of games opens many new lines of research. The creation of a hyper-agent selector, the transfer of AI learning between games, or explaining AI techniques using game terms, can all be facilitated by the use of game concepts. Other applications which can benefit from game concepts are also discussed, such as the generation of plausible reconstructed rules for incomplete ancient games, or the implementation of a board game recommender system.