CADIAPlayer

Student: Hilmar Finnsson (2007) - continued working on CADIAPlayer as a research assistant in 2008
Student: Gylfi Þór Guðmundsson (2008)
PI: Yngvi Björnsson

CADIAPlayer, our general game-playing software agent, is the reigning General Game Playing (GGP) world-champion.

CADIAPlayer earned the title by winning the 3rd International General Game-Playing (GGP) competition, ahead of a field of players from universities world-wide. It won both the preliminaries and the finals. The preliminaries consisted of 8 days of play, with over 40 different games being played.

The Preliminaries Results

Rank          Player                  Total Score            Institution
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1            CADIAPlayer               2723.50              Reykjavik University
 2            Fluxplayer                2355.50              Technical University of Dresden
 3            Ary                       2252.75              University of Paris 8
 4            ClunePlayer               2122.25              University of California, LA
 5            UTexas LARG               1798.00              University of Texas, Austin
 6            Jigsawbot                 1524.00              India Institute of Technology
 7            LuckyLemming              1250.50              Technical University of Dresden
 8            WWolfe                     821.25              Independent (Stanford student)

The GGP competition finals took place at the AAAI conference in Vancouver in July 22-26. The CADIA-Player agent won ClunePlayer, an agent from UCLA, in the final exciting match.

CADIAPlayer defended the title by winning the 4th International General Game-Playing (GGP) competition, again winning both the preliminaries and the finals. The preliminaries consisted of 6 days of play, with various single- two- and multi-player games being played.

The Preliminaries Results

Rank          Player                  Total Score            Institution
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1            CADIAPlayer               1530.00              Reykjavik University
 2            ClunePlayer               1429.00              University of California, LA
 3            Ary                       1402.75              University of Paris 8
 4            Fluxplayer                1336.25              Technical University of Dresden
 5            Maligne                   1149.00              University of Alberta
 6            Monomaniac                1058.75              University of New South Wales
 7            Centurio                   904.50              University of Potsdam
 8            Testplayer                 448.50              Alex Vitvitskyy
 9            UTexas LARG                336.75              University of Texas, Austin

The GGP competition finals this year took place at the AAAI conference in Chicago in July 15-17. Like the year before CADIAPlayer and the UCLA agent ClunePlayer went head to head in the final match, which consisted of three different games. In the end CADIAPlayer was victorious, winning two games of the three.

All details regarding game scores and results can be viewed in this Google spreadsheet document.

Artificial Intelligence researchers have for decades worked on building game-playing systems capable of matching wits with the strongest humans in the world. The success of such systems has largely been because of years of knowledge-engineering effort on behalf of the program developers, manually adding application-dependent knowledge to their programs.

The hope is to take this approach to the next level: to build intelligent software systems that can, given the rules of any game, automatically learn a strategy for playing the game without any human intervention. Artificial Intelligence technology has now matured to the point where this is within realm of possibility, so Stanford University started the General Game-Playing Competition (http://games.stanford.edu) as an initiative to facilitate further research in the area. This is the third year the competition is held. In the first year ClunePlayer, an entry from University of California Los Angeles, won; FluxPlayer (http://www.fluxagent.org/fluxplayer.htm) from Technical University of Dresden is the reigning GGP world-champion after winning last year's competition. This is the first time CADIA, Reykjavik University's AI laboratory, enters the competition.

The GGP project is led by Dr. Yngvi Björnsson. He and Hilmar Finnsson, a MSc student in computer science, are the authors of CADIA-Player.

• Hilmar Finnsson and Yngvi Björnsson (2008)Simulation-based Approach to General Game Playing. In The Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 259–264.
• Hilmar Finnson (2007) CADIA-Player: A General Game Playing Agent. MSc Thesis, School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University.

GGP Competition 2007

GGP Competition 2008