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A STRATEGIC METAGAME PLAYER FOR GENERAL CHESS‐LIKE GAMES
Author(s) -
Pell Barney
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
computational intelligence
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Book series
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.353
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 1467-8640
pISSN - 0824-7935
ISBN - 0-262-61102-3
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8640.1996.tb00258.x
Subject(s) - computer science , evaluation function , set (abstract data type) , construct (python library) , function (biology) , artificial intelligence , combinatorial game theory , class (philosophy) , value (mathematics) , screening game , sequential game , turns, rounds and time keeping systems in games , game mechanics , game theory , video game design , machine learning , mathematics , mathematical economics , programming language , evolutionary biology , biology
This paper introduces METAGAMER, the first program designed within the paradigm of Metagame‐playing (Metagame). This program plays games in the class of symmetric chess‐like games, which includes chess, Chinese chess, checkers, draughts, and Shogi. METAGAMER takes as input the rules of a specific game and analyzes those rules to construct an efficient representation and an evaluation function for that game; they are used by a generic search engine. The strategic analysis performed by METAGAMER relates a set of general knowledge sources to the details of the particular game. Among other properties, this analysis determines the relative value of the different pieces in a given game. Although METAGAMER does not learn from experience, the values resulting from its analysis are qualitatively similar to values used by experts on known games and are sufficient to produce competitive performance the first time METAGAMER plays a new game. Besides being the first Metagame‐playing program, this is the first program to have derived useful piece values directly from analysis of the rules of different games. This paper describes the knowledge implemented in METAGAMER, illustrates the piece values METAGAMER derives for chess and checkers, and discusses experiments with METAGAMER on both existing and newly generated games.