Artificial Intelligence for General Game Playing

A GENERAL GAME PLAYING (GGP) SYSTEM is one that can play arbitrary games based solely on formal game descriptions supplied at "runtime". (Translation: it does not get the rules until the game starts.) Unlike specialized game players, such as Deep Blue, general game players do not rely on algorithms designed in advance by their programmers for a specific game; instead, they utilize general technologies appropriate to any (discrete) game. In this brief talk, I will summarize the challenges of general game playing and techniques for meeting those challenges; I will describe our annual GGP competition; and I will talk about the practical and theoretical value of work in this area.

Speaker: Michael Genesereth, Stanford