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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>
79 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
79 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
# 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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