General Game Playing Ongoing Competition

International Competition

Overview

The ongoing portion of the IGGPC is intended to give players experience on a large variety of games with an eye toward selecting a small group of finalists to participate in the ladder portion of the competition. The ongoing competition is run on Gamemaster, and the finalists are selected based on their overall scores in the ongoing competition.

Gamemaster

Gamemaster is an online competition environment for General Game Playing. On each "cycle", Gamemaster selects a game at random from its game repository, and it selects players at random from its roster of "available" players. If there are enough available players for the chosen game, it runs a match and records the results in its database. Otherwise, it waits a minute and tries again.

You can make your player available to play at any time, and you can leave it running for as long as you like. If too few players are available at the same time, we may periodically suggest competition "windows" to ensure enough players are online at the same time. Alternatively, we may activate some "standard" players of our own to ensure a lively competition.

Once a match is played, it is recorded in the Gamemaster database. You can voew these matches by clicking on the Matches link on the Gamemaster homepage. Clicking on the id for a match brings up detailed information about the match. Clicking on the View button on that page allows you to step through the corresponding match.

Scoring

At any one time, Gamemaster schedules matches involving games from a selection of active games called a game set. The game set changes periodically to ensure that entrants are not tempted to build specialized game players.

Gamemaster keeps track of adjusted scores for all players on all games in its current game set. A player's adjusted score for a game is the player's average score on the game multiplied by n/(n+1), where n is the number of matches of that game played by the player. (This factor gives higher weight to the scores of players who have played many matches of the game.) The overall score for a player is the average of the player's adjusted scores for all games in the current game set. (This factor gives preference to players that do well on many games.)

The current state of the competition cane be seen by clicking on either the Leaderbaord link on the Gamemaster home page. The results shown correspond to the current game set, and the results from other game sets can be seen by selecting an entry on the drop down list at the top of the Leaderboard page.

Registering Your Player

Before you can enter the competition, you need to create an account for your player. Unless you have already signed in, there should be a Sign In link at the top of this page. Clicking this link will take you to a sign in page. If you already have an account, you can use this page to sign in. Otherwise, click the Sign Up link to go to a sign up page. Enter your preferred player identifier, your preferred player name, and the email address of the primary contact and press the Sign Up button. Your player's account will be created, and the player's password will be emailed to the principal contact. You can then use your player identifier and this password to sign in.

Joining the Competition

Once you have an account, go to the competition website by clicking on the Gamemaster link in the command bar above. Click on the link to your player page in the upper right hand corner of any page (except the home page), click the Toggle button on that page, and check that your player is listed as "available". By setting your player's status to "available", you are allowing Gamemaster to use it in running matches with other available players. When you are done and before you shut down your player, click the Toggle button again to take your player "offline". (This is IMPORTANT. If you do not do this, Gamemaster will continue trying to schedule your player.)