Repairing General Game Descriptions (extended version)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal approach to automatically repair incorrect game descriptions in the Game Description Language (GDL) using Answer Set Programming, addressing a key challenge in formal game specification and verification.

Contribution

It defines the minimal repair problem for GDL descriptions, provides complexity results, and presents an ASP-based method for automatic repair of ill-defined game descriptions.

Findings

Proved complexity results for minimal repair problems.

Developed an ASP encoding for automatic GDL repair.

Demonstrated effectiveness on real-world game descriptions.

Abstract

The Game Description Language (GDL) is a widely used formalism for specifying the rules of general games. Writing correct GDL descriptions can be challenging, especially for non-experts. Automated theorem proving has been proposed to assist game design by verifying if a GDL description satisfies desirable logical properties. However, when a description is proved to be faulty, the repair task itself can only be done manually. Motivated by the work on repairing unsolvable planning domain descriptions, we define a more general problem of finding minimal repairs for GDL descriptions that violate formal requirements, and we provide complexity results for various computational problems related to minimal repair. Moreover, we present an Answer Set Programming-based encoding for solving the minimal repair problem and demonstrate its application for automatically repairing ill-defined game descriptions.