The General Game Playing Base Package

A Common Infrastructure for GGP Players

General game playing is a field of artificial intelligence concerned with building programs that can play arbitrary games. For more information, see the Wikipedia article on General Game Playing.

The "General Game Playing Base Package" is a set of libraries and applications in Java designed to assist with the development of GGP gamers by providing a common infrastructure to base work on. The GGP Base will handle the mechanical aspects of communicating with the server, parsing GDL, representing the game as a state machine, and so on. Users of the GGP Base will be able to focus their efforts on writing innovative gaming algorithms.

Another explicit goal of this project is to develop useful applications/tools for writing games and testing gamers. This includes programs to verify that rulesheets contain legal GDL, programs to visualize matches and let humans easily interact with gamers, programs to automatically run large sets of matches between gamers and analyze the results, and so on. Development, testing, and visualization tools built using the GGP Base can benefit everybody using it.

An explicit non-goal of this project is to accumulate a large number of sophisticated, complex gamer implementations in this package. Groups developing gamers using the GGP Base are certainly welcome to open source their work, but the GGP Base itself should contain only a small number of simple example gamers against which developers can test their work.

The image for the GGP Base logo comes from Ali's Art Adventures, which is an awesome site for free artwork.