The main focus of the general game playing
community is the annual general game
playing competition. Competitions
typically held in conjunction with the
National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence sponsored by the AAAI, the
Association for Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence. Or sometimes by the
Bi-annual IJCAI International Conference
of Artificial Intelligence. It's
administered by Stanford University, so
many of those of you who are, of those of
you who are at Stanford are not eligible
to participate, at least while you're
still at Stanford. The competition began
in 2005 and has run annually ever since,
with the exception of 2009. Here is the
photo of Jim Clune, on the right being
congratulated by AAAI president Ron
Brachman. He is obviously pleased at his
player having won, however the smile might
be doing small part to the $10,000 he
received for winning the competition. here
is Michael Thielscher and Stephan
Schiffel, winners of the competition at
AAAI'06 And here we have an assembly of
winners. that's Hilmar Finnsson and Yngvi
Bjrnsson on the left, are the winners of
the 2007, 2008 and 2012 competitions.
Together, with Stephan Schiffel and
Michael Thielscher, are the winners of
2006. And Jim Clune, on the right, the
winner in 2005. Now, and these were not
the only winners. some of the spectators
even got in on the action with a bit of
betting. Now, I don't wanna toot my horn
here, but just let me say that, last year,
I came away somewhat wealthier than I
expected at Chris Welty's expense. The
format of this year's competition is
typical. there will be a qualification
round in June of 2013. This will be
followed by a semi-final tournament just
prior to the AAAI conference in Seattle.
And, and it will culminate in a final
competition of the conference itself to
determine, next year's winner. And if the
winner will take all the glory and a
chance to compete in the carbon versus
silicon competition. In addition to the
regular GGP competition, there will also
be another battle between carbon and
silicon. This will be the third such
contest. unfortunately for us the humans
are not doing all that well. this past
year the CADIA player, the world champion
handily defeated the human race
represented by, here Chris Welty pictured
here. in keeping with the double
elimination format of the competition, the
contestants played two different games. In
the first, CADIA player easily defeated
the human, in a very well played match of
dual Connect4. Then won a match of
platform jumpers. as a consolation prize,
the human was awarded two bottles of
scotch, in part to ease his disappointment
in having let down the human race. And my
hope is that the prospect of receiving the
scotch didn't affect his performance. okay
for those of you want to get involved in
the competition or just want to learn more
about general game playing, here's a list
of resources; games.stanford.edu is the
homepage for general game playing at
Stanford, and there's also a database of
official competition results at
gamemaster.stanford.edu. ggp.org and the
general game playing cited addressed in
provides support for the development of
general game playing programs. There is
also a short wikipedia article. And you
can find scholarly publications in GGP by
googling general game playing. Finally,
for those of you, who want to learn more,
there will be an online course on GGP, via
Coursera in the spring of 2013. As part of
the course work, you will get to build
general game player, and of course you
will have plenty of time for you to
register your player to compete in next
summer's competition.