Ludii -- The Ludemic General Game System

TL;DR

Ludii is a versatile, efficient, and human-readable general game system that outperforms existing GGP reasoners and offers broad applicability for AI research, game design, and education.

Contribution

It introduces Ludii, a ludemic approach to defining games, enabling concise descriptions, and demonstrates its superior performance and versatility over existing systems.

Findings

Ludii outperforms GDL-based reasoners in all tested games.

Ludii is competitive with the RBG system in performance.

Ludii offers advantages in generality and understandability.

Abstract

While current General Game Playing (GGP) systems facilitate useful research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game-playing, they are often somewhat specialised and computationally inefficient. In this paper, we describe the "ludemic" general game system Ludii, which has the potential to provide an efficient tool for AI researchers as well as game designers, historians, educators and practitioners in related fields. Ludii defines games as structures of ludemes -- high-level, easily understandable game concepts -- which allows for concise and human-understandable game descriptions. We formally describe Ludii and outline its main benefits: generality, extensibility, understandability and efficiency. Experimentally, Ludii outperforms one of the most efficient Game Description Language (GDL) reasoners, based on a propositional network, in all games available in the Tiltyard GGP repository. Moreover, Ludii is also competitive in terms of performance with the more recently proposed Regular Boardgames (RBG) system, and has various advantages in qualitative aspects such as generality.