ci / check (push) Failing after 4s

Details

simulators/: persist the survey, and let it shrink two of the three tracks

Eight profiles on a common schema, each marking what was checked against a
source this session and what is background recollection. Three are marked
unverified in full — Machinations, the play substrates, most of RBG — and
say so rather than reading as evaluations. Written straight after three
review rounds whose entire yield was claims outrunning what had been
checked, so the confidence rule is the first thing in the README.

The survey changed the plan, which is what a survey is for.

Track C was described in Positioning as open ground. It is not: Browne
published 57 criteria for game quality, and Ai Ai already computes
designer-facing measures — drama, lead changes, branching factor,
completion, duration — from played games. The track becomes adopt, credit
and find the gap. The gap looks real: those measures presume a leader, and
SHARED GROUND has none — Modes.csv gives its tiebreak as "Not applicable".

Track B probably adopts rather than builds. OpenSpiel implements CFR,
best-response and exploitability over games that are simultaneous-move,
imperfect-information and co-operative, which is all four of GROUND's
awkward properties. "Does ATTACK ever pay" is a best-response question,
and we spent three review rounds refining a two-policy sweep for it. The
first Track B task is now one question — is exploitability meaningful for
a co-operative game with a shared threshold — not a build.

The cost of not surveying earlier is therefore measurable, and is recorded
rather than glossed.

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

2026-08-08 11:56:27 +02:00

3 KiB

Raw Blame History

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 ludeme tree with an equipment section (pieces, board) and a rules section (setup, play, end conditions). Games are modified by adjusting ludemes or parameters such as board size. Each game's description fits in a QR code. checked

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.

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, hidden role state, and a binding multi-round state machine like DARVO? If not, GROUND is outside its expressiveness and Track A's second game should be chosen to test that boundary deliberately.
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)

3 KiB Raw Blame History