General Game Playing: a Challenge for AI

Games represent an exciting challenge for Artificial Intelligence. The ability of computers to confront human beings in a convincing manner, or even to defeat them, fascinate most people. Besides, games are a good framework to test algorithms developed for more general problems. Thus games are a good area to test out AI techniques and to develop new approaches. Recently, stronger results were provided and, for many games, computer skills are far away from human abilities.
We focus in this talk on the challenge of General Game Playing. The topic of General Game Playing (GGP) is to develop artificial agents able to play any game, without human intervention. The rules of each game are described in a declarative representation language, called Game Description Language (GDL). These rules are given to the agent only a few minutes before playing, which makes it difficult to apply current techniques. We discuss in this talk the difficulty of this challenge, some recent results and some possible applications in real life.

Assoc. Prof. Sylvain Lagrue – University of Artois (France)

LAGRUE Sylvain is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Université d’Artois/CRIL CNRS UMR 8188 (France). His research includes Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, Uncertainty in AI and Games. He is currently invited at the VNU in the framework of the EU Project Aniage.