Simon McGregor on Wed, 4 Aug 2010 02:48:27 -0700 (MST)


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Re: [game-lang] a survey of previous work


On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Marc Lanctot <lanctot@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 07/24/2010 06:59 AM, Joel Uckelman wrote:
>> Thus spake Marc Lanctot:
>>>
>>> I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but... I'd really like to
>>> know why we wouldn't want to form a superset of GDL.
>>>
>>
>> I'm not saying we don't. I'm not saying either way yet, as I haven't
>> had a chance to seriously study GDL yet.
>>
>
> Alright. Maybe we should start more like a reading group; each week we can
> discuss what we read, why it's good for our purpose, or why it's not, and
> then eventually we'll have the ground knowledge to know where to go from
> there. There isn't a huge literature out there, but there are some very
> relevant places to start. I'm not a GDL expert, but since it's the most-used
> and extensively studied general game language, we should probably have a
> good grasp on its strengths and weaknesses.
>
> Any objections? This seemed to be the direction we were going anyway, so I
> hope not.
>
> Before that, we should probably agree on what our goal is :)
>
> I'll now follow-up on Gala.
>
>  http://voidstar.boldlygoingnowhere.org/lanctot/tmp/koller97gala.pdf
>
> Gala is a language for representing extensive-form games with imperfect
> information (the mathematical description of 'game'). It was designed by
> Daphne Koller et. al., the same people who designed a popular algorithm
> called "Sequence-Form Linear Programming" for finding Nash Equilibria in
> imperfect information, circa 1994. As far as I know,  they designed Gala
> specifically because they released an implementation of their algorithm and
> wanted people to use it to 'solve' games. I don't know how much we can gain
> from this (I don't know how many people are using it, I don't know much
> about it.. ), but it's a start.
>

GALA also shows up the holes in my grasp of logic programming. The
paper says that they model a game as paths through a program (using
the "choose" operator, which is nondeterministic). But it makes it
sound like this is an execution path, and I can't quite get my head
around how one executes a declarative program. Incidentally, GALA
(like GDL?) is based on PROLOG - a language I've never used.

The code snippet in that paper looks almost readable.


Simon
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