Subject: metagame paper available

From: [email-masked] (Barney Pell)
Date: Mon, 2 May 94 18:41:42 PDT

The following paper is available by anonymous ftp, in the file:
        ftp.cl.cam.ac.uk:users/bdp/mg-aaai94.ps.Z
This paper will be presented at AAAI-94, and is a substantially altered
version of the paper by the same title presented at the Fall 93 AAAI
symposium on Games: Learning and Planning. 

A STRATEGIC METAGAME-PLAYER FOR GENERAL CHESS-LIKE GAMES

                By Barney Pell

abstract:  

This paper introduces METAGAMER, the first program designed within the
paradigm of Meta-Game Playing (Metagame).  This program plays Metagame
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 analyses those rules to
construct for that game an efficient representation and an evaluation
function, for use 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 actually plays each
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.

content areas: game-playing, machine learning, knowledge-representation

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     Barney Pell
     NASA Ames Research Center,
     Mail Stop 269-2,
     Moffett Field,
     CA 94035-1000
     USA

     (415) 604-3361
     [email-masked]
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