General Game Playing

General Artificial Intelligence

1. Your primary responsibility this week is to form a team to take the course. Teams of three people are strongly preferred, but teams with two or four people are okay provided that there are exceptionally good reasons.) Invent a name for your player. Be creative. Some team names from the past: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Heinz 57, and my personal favorite Michael Genesereth. Create a suitable identifier for your player. Lower case letters, digits, and underscores only, e.g. red_hot_chili_peppers, heinz_57, and michael_genesereth. Try to be succinct, as you will have to type the identifier often.


2. Once you have a team, you can register a player on Gamemaster. Unless you have already registered your player, click here to go to a sign up page. Enter your player name, your player identifier, and the email addresses of your team members; then press the Sign Up button. (Please use your Stanford email addresses only. Please use your Stanford email addresses only. Please use your Stanford email addresses only.) Your player will be registered, and a passcode will be emailed to all team members. You can then use your player identifier and this passcode to sign in on Gamemaster pages (using the Sign in link in the top right corner of most Gamemaster pages).


3. Connect to Gamemaster and familiarize yourself with the information and capabilities available there.


4. Click on the Games link. Read the description of Alquerque. Click the corresponding Standalone link. This will open a window in which you can play a match of the game. The point of the exercise is to become familiar with the practice of starting and playing games.


5. Go back to the Gamemaster page, click on Players, and Launch two different players, e.g. Random and Twostep. (Each will pop up a new window. If your browser is set to open links in new tabs, adjust the settings so that you can open windows.) Go back to the Games page, click the Manager link for Alquerque, click on the names of the players in the scoreboard, and change the values there to correspond to the names of the players you created. Press Begin and watch the players play the match.

Submission details: You do not need to submit anything for this week's assignment. We will use information from your Gamemaster account to identify members of your team and to assign grades at the end of the quarter. No team - no grade. No Stanford email address - no grade.