Regular Games -- an Automata-Based General Game Playing Language
This work addresses the need for efficient and user-friendly game design tools in AI and procedural content generation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing GGP concepts with a new automata-based approach.
The authors tackled the problem of creating a computationally efficient and convenient General Game Playing (GGP) system by proposing Regular Games (RG), which uses finite automata to define game rules and achieves faster forward models than state-of-the-art systems like Regular Boardgames and Ludii.
We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) system called Regular Games (RG). The main goal of RG is to be both computationally efficient and convenient for game design. The system consists of several languages. The core component is a low-level language that defines the rules by a finite automaton. It is minimal with only a few mechanisms, which makes it easy for automatic processing (by agents, analysis, optimization, etc.). The language is universal for the class of all finite turn-based games with imperfect information. Higher-level languages are introduced for game design (by humans or Procedural Content Generation), which are eventually translated to a low-level language. RG generates faster forward models than the current state of the art, beating other GGP systems (Regular Boardgames, Ludii) in terms of efficiency. Additionally, RG's ecosystem includes an editor with LSP, automaton visualization, benchmarking tools, and a debugger of game description transformations.