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CB-RES-0009: extensive form is the lingua franca

Two questions from the maintainer — is there a game-theory mapping to
Ludii's language, and is that language formal enough to derive one from.
Yes, no, and the no does not matter.

The mapping is proven, not to be invented: "The Ludii Game Description
Language is Universal" shows the language can represent an equivalent game
for any finite, non-deterministic, imperfect-information game, extending
earlier work limited to finite deterministic fully-observable
extensive-form games. EFG is also OpenSpiel's object, so the same
formalism connects description to analysis: Ludii -> EFG <- OpenSpiel.

Ludii's syntax is formal and unusually so — a class grammar derived
automatically from its source. Its semantics are its Java: a ludeme means
what its class does, and Ludii effectively makes Java the game description
language. So there is no independent calculus to extract. The formality
lives in the universality RESULT, not in a definition of meaning. GDL has
the semantics and pays for it in speed — six times on Gomoku, twenty on
Amazons and Hex, over two hundred on Chess.

Conclusion: do not derive a language from Ludii; target the EFG directly.

And we are closer than the tracks assumed. The journal is the history,
Outcome is the payoff, legal_commands gives the actions — and
project(Viewer::Player(seat)) IS the information partition, built so a
player is not shown another's hand and unremarked as exactly the machinery
imperfect information needs.

Three gaps: chance is folded into a seed so a game is one realisation
rather than a game with chance nodes; perfect recall is unasserted, which
CFR and exploitability both assume; and commit/reveal is the standard EFG
encoding of simultaneity but is never stated as such. Perfect recall is
checkable from the journal today and is now Track B's first task — if it
fails, every equilibrium concept we might quote is unsound here.

Also re-vendored the catalog twice: ground-game added H2 — scoped problem
stress, applying End Stress by personal/bond/global scope instead of flat
to everyone, which is a direct response to our reading that H1's tax
scales with the Problems while its intended effect does not.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-08-08 14:57:25 +02:00

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Ludii

Digital Ludeme Project (Maastricht / Cameron Browne, ERC-funded) · Java · checked that it exists and what it claims; licence unverified

What it optimises for

Generality and concision of game representation. Games are structures of ludemes — high-level, human-understandable game concepts — which gives concise descriptions and a very large game library, with historical reconstruction as a founding motivation. checked

How a game is defined

A game is a quintuple of ludemes — Name, Players, Mode, Equipment, Rules. Games are modified by adjusting ludemes or parameters such as board size. Each game's description fits in a QR code. checked

Syntax formal, semantics not checked — the sharp point, and it answers "can we derive a formal language from it": no, there is nothing semantic to extract.

The grammar is a class grammar, automatically derived from Ludii's source, so keywords and their argument types come from the class hierarchy. That is more formal than most hand-written grammars.
But "Ludii effectively makes its programming language (Java) the game description language": a ludeme means what its Java class does. Compilation produces a forward model (legal moves, apply, copy).

Contrast GDL, which has a logical semantics independent of any interpreter and pays for it in speed and verbosity. See ../research/CB-RES-0009-extensive-form-is-the-lingua-franca.md.

What it can analyse

Playouts, agent play, and a published set of general board game concepts used to measure distance between games. checked The concept vocabulary is the interesting part for us — it is a shared feature space over games.

Depth of design-facing analysis relative to Ai Ai: open.

The game-theoretic mapping

Proven, and it is the extensive-form game. The Ludii Game Description Language is Universal shows the language can represent an equivalent game for any finite, non-deterministic, imperfect-information game, extending earlier work limited to finite deterministic fully-observable EFGs. checked

That matters more than it looks: EFG is also OpenSpiel's object, so the same formalism connects description to analysis.

What it does not do

It is a description someone writes, not a claim about another party's artifact. There is no notion of a game owner who rules on an underdetermined case, no finding queue, no provenance binding to a publisher's data. unverified as an absolute, but nothing in the material we read suggests otherwise.
No evidence-admissibility machinery: its outputs are data, not claims under review.

Relevance to clay-borg

Track A, and it is the benchmark. If clay-borg's answer to "why not Ludii" is "ours is in Rust", there is no answer (../specs/Positioning.md §1).

The serious question Track A must answer is whether we need a game description language at all, or should consume Ludii's and contribute the evidence layer on top.

What to steal

Ludemes as the decomposition unit. Our kernel has commands, events and rules; a ludeme is a game idea that composes. That is a better fit for "define a popular game efficiently".
The concept vocabulary as a comparison space between games.
Concision as a discipline — a description that fits in a QR code is a description a designer can read.

What to avoid

Breadth as the goal. Ludii's value is that it covers a thousand games; ours would have to be that it says something trustworthy about one.

Open questions

Licence, and whether it permits embedding or only interoperation.
~~Can a Ludii description express simultaneous commit/reveal and hidden role state?~~ Answered: yes. Universality covers finite non-deterministic imperfect-information games, and simultaneity is the standard EFG information-set encoding. The live question is whether a binding multi-round state machine like DARVO stays readable — universality says expressible, not concise, and concision is Ludii's actual selling point.
What its analysis output actually contains.

Sources

Ludii — The Ludemic General Game System, ECAI 2020 (https://ludii.games/publications/ECAI2020.pdf)
The Ludii Game Description Language is Universal (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.00451)
A note on the empirical comparison of RBG and Ludii (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.00309)

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