Efficient Reasoning in Regular Boardgames

TL;DR

This paper introduces optimized reasoning techniques for the Regular Boardgames language, demonstrating significant efficiency improvements and competitive performance compared to other general game playing systems.

Contribution

It presents novel compiler optimizations for RBG, achieving up to 33-fold efficiency gains, and provides a comprehensive comparison with existing GGP systems.

Findings

RBG is the fastest among abstract GGP languages

Optimizations lead to 1.7 to 33 times faster game playouts

RBG's efficiency rivals handcrafted game-specific reasoners

Abstract

We present the technical side of reasoning in Regular Boardgames (RBG) language -- a universal General Game Playing (GGP) formalism for the class of finite deterministic games with perfect information, encoding rules in the form of regular expressions. RBG serves as a research tool that aims to aid in the development of generalized algorithms for knowledge inference, analysis, generation, learning, and playing games. In all these tasks, both generality and efficiency are important. In the first part, this paper describes optimizations used by the RBG compiler. The impact of these optimizations ranges from 1.7 to even 33-fold efficiency improvement when measuring the number of possible game playouts per second. Then, we perform an in-depth efficiency comparison with three other modern GGP systems (GDL, Ludii, Ai Ai). We also include our own highly optimized game-specific reasoners to provide a point of reference of the maximum speed. Our experiments show that RBG is currently the fastest among the abstract general game playing languages, and its efficiency can be competitive to common interface-based systems that rely on handcrafted game-specific implementations. Finally, we discuss some issues and methodology of computing benchmarks like this.