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Sancho GGP Player: December 2014

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Tuesday, December 9, 2014. Last Christmas, my father-in-law gave me a copy of Mancala (also known as Kalah. Or Kalaha). I've played it a few dozen times, but my 7 year old daughter still beats me regularly! So I wondered about coding up the rules in GDL to see how Sancho plays it. As it transpires, a quick look in the base repository revealed that somebody had already done this. For now, I've produced an annotated version of the GDL. Which you may like to peruse. (You'll definitely want to understand...

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Sancho GGP Player: AAAI15

http://sanchoggp.blogspot.com/2015/01/aaai15.html

Saturday, January 31, 2015. The 29th Conference on Artifical Intelligence (AAAI15) was held in Austin last week (see http:/ www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/aaai15.php. And since that's where I live I was able to spend some time there meeting GGP researchers who were attending, and in particular the Stanford and New South Wales teams under Professors Genesereth and Thielsche (respectively), who are behind the Coursera GGP course, which initially introduced me to the field. The cup in new hands:.

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Sancho GGP Player: August 2014

http://sanchoggp.blogspot.com/2014_08_01_archive.html

Wednesday, August 20, 2014. Who ate all the pies? Whilst reading up on various abstract strategy games, I was introduced to the concept of the Pie rule. In the last few days, I have created Pie-rule variants of 9-board Tic-Tac-Toe. I've also created a visualization for regular Hex. So, for the GDL authors out there (by which I suppose I mean Alex! Consider the Pie rule for creating balance in your game. For everybody else, what games would you like to see a Pie rule variant of? Sunday, August 17, 2014.

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Sancho GGP Player: Caught in the tar pit

http://sanchoggp.blogspot.com/2014/09/caught-in-tar-pit.html

Sunday, September 28, 2014. Caught in the tar pit. I have been a bit remiss in making regular posts recently, and as some may have noticed, Sancho has also been absent from Tiltyard for nearly a month. I expected it to take 3 or 4 days, but it soon turned out to be a sticky morass, from which escape was more difficult than envisaged! Stabilizing this change took roughly the expected time, but unexpectedly it turned out to have a distinctly damaging impact on the quality of play in games that employed heu...

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Sancho GGP Player: May 2014

http://sanchoggp.blogspot.com/2014_05_01_archive.html

Tuesday, May 27, 2014. A picture is worth a thousand words. I have spent the last little while sorting out Sancho's logging along with the recording and visualization of statistical information. No, it isn't the most thrilling thing to do, but I'm convinced that it will be worth it. Up until now, Sancho has had an assorted collection of System.out.println. Calls with the odd System.err.println. Is an excellent logging framework that's simple to integrate and easy to configure to suit your needs. This...

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Sancho GGP Player: July 2015

http://sanchoggp.blogspot.com/2015_07_01_archive.html

Sunday, July 12, 2015. Local Search in Breakthrough-like games. Finally I have time to write the long-promised follow-up to my last post, which is an example of using an approximate factorization technique to improve play. Breakthrough exhibits locality of effect for moves in the following senses:. 2) Each move impacts only a small number of base propositions, and thence of legals. These constraints allow us to statically calculate a useful distance metric on the space of moves, wherein the distance betw...

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Sancho GGP Player: June 2014

http://sanchoggp.blogspot.com/2014_06_01_archive.html

Tuesday, June 17, 2014. In this post, I’ll describe how Sancho gained a significant improvement in performance - by going green. Reduce, reuse, recycle. As with many other cities around the world, the City of Edinburgh Council encourages its residents to reduce, reuse and recycle - in that order. Reduce: Don’t create the rubbish in the first place. (Buy less, buy items with less packaging, etc.). Reuse: Don’t throw things away after their first use. Use them again. So we set about doing something about it.

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Sancho GGP Player: Kalaha

http://sanchoggp.blogspot.com/2014/12/kalaha.html

Tuesday, December 9, 2014. Last Christmas, my father-in-law gave me a copy of Mancala (also known as Kalah. Or Kalaha). I've played it a few dozen times, but my 7 year old daughter still beats me regularly! So I wondered about coding up the rules in GDL to see how Sancho plays it. As it transpires, a quick look in the base repository revealed that somebody had already done this. For now, I've produced an annotated version of the GDL. Which you may like to peruse. (You'll definitely want to understand...

sanchoggp.blogspot.com

Sancho GGP Player: Goal Latches

http://sanchoggp.blogspot.com/2014/08/goal-latches.html

Sunday, August 17, 2014. Identifying latches can be useful in several ways:. It may allow reduced computational effort in calculating state transitions (e.g. - if a part of the propnet is effectively 'dark' due to a latch condition, then once that latch is detected that part of the propnet can be left uncalculated in future state transitions). Similarly it may allow reduced computational effort in heuristic calculation. If the latch constrains the achievable goals then it can be used to optimize search.