Week 1

Okay. We are on our way! First week of class begins now.

To get started, click the Lessons tab at the top of this page. The Lessons page provides links to lecture slides, readings, and other resources. And it contains links to the weekly assignments, including details of how to submit your work. The Lessons page is your friend. Use it.

The Readings tab at the top of this page provides links to relevant articles on General Game Playing. You are not required to read these articles, but you may find the subject matter helpful as you design and build your game players.

The Resources tab provides links to useful tools and related websites.

The Gamemaster tab leads to the Gamemaster competition management system. Gamemaster includes descriptions of games and links to tools to play those games yourselves or to manage matches between automated players. Also, by signing in on this website, you can register your player to compete against other players.

The Forum is a great way to communicate with your fellow students - to ask questions, to offer answers, and to discuss the course material. It is also the best way to communicate with the course staff. You should use the Forum rather than emailing us individually, as this will allow us all to see your questions and/or comments and you will get quicker responses that way.

The lesson this week is mostly introduction, and the assignment is not onerous. We would like you form teams, invent a name for your team / player and create an account for your team / player on the course website. We would also like you to use the Gamemaster site to play a few games amongst yourselves - to become familiar with the practice of learning and playing new games. See Assignment 1 for details (accessible via link on the Lessons page).

Course Overview

General game players are computer systems able to play strategy games based solely on formal game descriptions supplied at "runtime". (In other words, they don't know the rules until the games start.) Unlike specialized game players, general game players must be able to play games they have never seen, possibly including games that no-one has ever seen. Importantly, general game players cannot rely on algorithms designed in advance for specific games; they must discover the algorithms themselves, with limited computing resources and under strong constraints on time. General game playing success requires intelligence on the part of the *game player* rather than intelligence of the *programmer* of the game player.

General Game Playing (GGP) is an interesting application in its own right. It is intellectually engaging and more than a little fun. But it is much more than that. Success at General Game Playing relies on expertise in formal knowledge representation and reasoning and emphasizes the importance of those technologies in building useful, intelligent systems. More fundamentally, it provides a theoretical framework for analyzing rationality in a way that takes into account problem representation, incompleteness of information, and resource bounds. The upshot is that it raises questions about the nature of intelligence and serves as a laboratory in which to evaluate competing approaches to artificial intelligence.

This course is a hands-on introduction to GGP. Theoretical background is provided through lectures and readings, but the main pedagogical value of the course derives from the use of this theory to create general game playing programs able to perform effectively.

All of the course materials are online here. There are links to lessons, background readings, resources, the Gamemaster competition system, and the course forum. Note that, as you proceed through the online materials, you may occasionally encounter problems. Apologies in advance for this. We are still developing the course. You may get extra credit for reporting such problems (especially if your reports are not especially irate).

There will be ten in-person class sessions. See the table below for a summary of the topics of these sessions and their locations. Note that you are expected to attend all sessions (unless there are extreme extenuating circumstances).

All work in the course must be done in teams; and, except in extreme circumstances, all team members will receive the same grade. Grades for the course will be based on (1) weekly assignments, (2) performance in competitions, and (3) a final report. The majority of the assignments concern the development of a functioning general game playing program. Your program does not need to win competitions to receive a perfect grade; however, it must function correctly and illustrate the lessons of the course. That said, there will be extra credit for especially noteworthy performance in competitions. People who take CS227B tend to immerse themselves in the course and do good work; and, with occasional exceptions, most students receive high grades.

Important note: we use elementary JavaScript in all our examples and software libraries; and, in a departure from the past, we require you to use JavaScript in building your players. JavaScript is quite easy to learn and has the merit of running natively in World Wide Web browsers. If you are unfamiliar with the language, you can learn more by clicking here or here.