Re: [game-lang] review of GDL

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thus spake Marc Lanctot:
> 
> Yes. IIRC, this was similar to their argument at last year's general 
> game-playing workshop. "It [arithmetic] makes resolution much harder" is 
> what I kept hearing them say. That's precisely where I lost interest 
> because I'm not interested in the purity of the logical properties of 
> the language for uses that are irrelevant to our purpose.
>

While I am interested in having nice properties, I think we can do it
without making the language convoluted as a result, for the simple 
reason that you don't run into pathological cases when you reason about
games yourself.
 
> I'm not an expert here, as I'm sure you can tell. So I can't comment on 
> much about the logic. I agree with Joel's points and observations. I 
> always expected a logical game description language to be more like the 
> situation calculus** with built-in high-level abstract board game 
> concepts and stochastic events.
> 
> **http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_calculus

When I first encountered GDL, I thought it *was* a situation calculus.

The big issue with the situation calculus is the frame problem, which GDL
(and Datalog derivatives generally) don't have because there any formulas
which can't be proved to be true are automatically false.

The fluent calculus gets around this, aparently:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent_calculus

We might want a fluent calculus.

-- 
J.
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