The, the defining characteristic of General Game Playing is the
players don't know the rules of games before those games begin.
Game rules are communicated only at runtime and the players must be able to
read and understand the descriptions they are
given in order to play legally and effectively.
This characteristic carries with it the requirement
of a language for writing game rules.
In general game playing, information about games is typically
communicated to players in the formal
language called Game Description Language or GDL.
As mentioned in the introduction, GDL is widely used in the research literature.
And it's used in virtually all general game-playing competitions.
Moreover, it forms the basis for some more expressive variants that have
significant value in real-world applications such
as enterprise management and computational law.
As we shall see, GDL is a logic programming language.
Game descriptions are logic programs consisting of
rules that define the key elements of games.
Such as initial conditions, move legality, game
dynamics, rewards and termination and so forth.
This lesson is an overview of GDL.
We're to begin with a detailed introduction to logic programs in GDL.
We then look at a sample game description and we'll look at
the use of this description in simulating a match of the game.
Finally, we talk about some additional requirements
on games that ensure that they are interesting.
And we summarize the prefix syntax for
GDL used in most general game playing competitions.