General Game Playing Competition
The General Game Playing Competition will be held Sunday –Monday, July 22–23, in the Prince of Wales room. The follow-up Human vs. Machine Exhibition will be held Tuesday –Thursday, July 24–26, in Plaza A.
General game players are systems able to accept declarative descriptions of arbitrary games at "runtime" and able to use such descriptions to play those games effectively without human intervention.
Because game descriptions are presented at runtime, unlike specialized game players such as Deep Blue, general game players cannot rely on algorithms designed in advance for specific games. Instead, to perform well general game players must incorporate various Artificial Intelligence technologies and techniques such as knowledge representation, reasoning, learning, and rational decision-making. Moreover, they must do so in an integrated fashion.
While general game playing is a topic with inherent interest, work in its area has practical value as well. Its underlying technology can be used in a variety of other application areas, such as business process management, electronic commerce, and military operations.
The Competition
This year's AAAI competition is designed to test the abilities of general game playing systems by comparing their performance on a variety of previously unseen games. The 2007 competition will consist of four rounds of competition held during June 2007, with a final championship round to be held in Vancouver at the AAAI. Over the four rounds, each general game player will play approximately 80 matches, where the combined scores accumulated during those matches will be used to determine player rankings as well as the finalists in the championship round. The winner of the championship round will be crowned the winner of the competition, and its programmer(s) will be awarded a $10,000 prize. Additionally, this year's winner will be given the opportunity to compete in a special general-game-player-versus-human exposition match. AAAI gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution of Michael Genesereth, who has made this award possible.
Entrants will compete on a wide variety of games organized into taxonomies designed to isolate features of general games that are both exploitable and scientifically interesting. Examples of such taxonomies include number of players, branching factor, repeated states, and decomposability into independent sub-games. Entrants will be expected to play games that require both competition and cooperation, as well as games that may not be exhaustively searchable in the time allowed. Prior to competition, entrants will be told nothing about the games that they will play beyond the taxonomies that they will be organized into. Instead, the rules for all games will be transmitted to players electronically at the beginning of each match.