80 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
80 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
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# Ludii
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Digital Ludeme Project (Maastricht / Cameron Browne, ERC-funded) · Java ·
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`checked` that it exists and what it claims; **licence `unverified`**
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## What it optimises for
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**Generality and concision of game representation.** Games are structures
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of **ludemes** — high-level, human-understandable game concepts — which
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gives concise descriptions and a very large game library, with historical
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reconstruction as a founding motivation. `checked`
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## How a game is defined
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A ludeme tree with an `equipment` section (pieces, board) and a `rules`
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section (setup, play, end conditions). Games are modified by adjusting
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ludemes or parameters such as board size. **Each game's description fits
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in a QR code.** `checked`
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## What it can analyse
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Playouts, agent play, and a published set of **general board game
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concepts** used to measure *distance between games*. `checked` The
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concept vocabulary is the interesting part for us — it is a shared
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feature space over games.
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Depth of design-facing analysis relative to Ai Ai: `open`.
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## What it does not do
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- It is **a description someone writes**, not a claim about another
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party's artifact. There is no notion of a game *owner* who rules on an
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underdetermined case, no finding queue, no provenance binding to a
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publisher's data. `unverified` as an absolute, but nothing in the
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material we read suggests otherwise.
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- No evidence-admissibility machinery: its outputs are data, not claims
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under review.
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## Relevance to clay-borg
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**Track A, and it is the benchmark.** If clay-borg's answer to *"why not
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Ludii"* is "ours is in Rust", there is no answer
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([`../specs/Positioning.md`](../specs/Positioning.md) §1).
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The serious question Track A must answer is **whether we need a game
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description language at all**, or should consume Ludii's and contribute
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the evidence layer on top.
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## What to steal
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- **Ludemes as the decomposition unit.** Our kernel has commands, events
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and rules; a ludeme is a *game idea* that composes. That is a better
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fit for "define a popular game efficiently".
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- **The concept vocabulary** as a comparison space between games.
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- **Concision as a discipline** — a description that fits in a QR code is
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a description a designer can read.
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## What to avoid
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Breadth as the goal. Ludii's value is that it covers a thousand games;
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ours would have to be that it says something trustworthy about one.
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## Open questions
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- Licence, and whether it permits embedding or only interoperation.
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- Can a Ludii description express **simultaneous commit/reveal, hidden
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role state, and a binding multi-round state machine** like DARVO? If
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not, GROUND is outside its expressiveness and Track A's second game
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should be chosen to test that boundary deliberately.
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- What its analysis output actually contains.
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## Sources
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- *Ludii — The Ludemic General Game System*, ECAI 2020
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(https://ludii.games/publications/ECAI2020.pdf)
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- *The Ludii Game Description Language is Universal*
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(https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.00451)
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- *A note on the empirical comparison of RBG and Ludii*
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(https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.00309)
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