Subject: new metagame paper available by ftp

From: [email-masked] (Barney Pell)
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 94 15:28:48 PST

I have placed a copy of a paper I submitted to AAAI-94 on my ftp
directory, as 	
	ftp.cl.cam.ac.uk:/users/bdp/ai94-draft.ps.Z
Although it was based on my paper at the Fall Symposium on Games, it
is quite different from that paper and discusses some newer results. 

ps. Am I the only one using this list???

--- Barney

The abstract follows:

title: A Strategic Metagame-Player for General Chess-Like Games

author: Barney Pell

address: Mailstop 269-2, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
94035-1000

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