Hello,

A quick announcement to tell you that we are in the process of finalizing the grading. It should be done by the beginning of next week. I would like to remind the players who were active on Tiltyard who gave us their e-mail adress to check their inbox, they may have a surprise waiting for them!

Happy holidays!

Sat 14 Dec 2013 3:39 AM CET

This class is almost over, we were thrilled to teach it to so many students and hope you enjoyed it as well. Many students have expressed the intention to keep improving their players over time: this is great and we want to support that in any way we can !

The Coursera forums will close at some point in time, so we set up a new (persistent) forum platform where people can keep exchanging at http://ggp.boards.net/. We will try to port some information over ourselves (namely: the resources & notes links), but definitely feel free to move over there valuable information and discussions from the Coursera forums.

We hope that this new forum will operate smoothly on its own, but feel free to email us to report issues or make suggestions !

The GGP teaching team.

Fri 13 Dec 2013 11:29 PM CET

The competition is over!

After 7 grueling hours, Stephen's player Quixote victoriously overcame all opposition to become the grand champion of the GGP Coursera 2013 competition.

We would like to congratulate our eight participants. It was with their combined efforts that we managed to sustain a stream of interesting games all day long. The games were close and interesting. We had lots of two player games, but also some puzzles, and even a game of chinese checkers with four players. It was very entertaining because the general game players often play like we think they should play, but sometimes, their moves are so strange that they leave us baffled. Was it an obvious mistake? Or was it for reasons I cannot understand? We have seen our shares of big mistakes, but more often than not, it was simply the players seeing an outcome that we could not foresee.

If you would like to know a bit more about our top 8, each player has kindly agreed to write a not-so-short introduction about them and their players. I highly recommend reading it, it is very interesting. Some of you may like the technical details, some of you may appreciate the human side, but I am sure that you will feel the passion they all had.

For fun, I suggest you watch this 40 second long video to have an overview of what GGP players can do.



This is likely to be the last post of this course. I hope you all had a great time. We had our ups and downs, but with your input, we are certain that the quality of the course has drastically improved. Thank you so much for joining us!

mrg, Sam, Arthur, Bertrand, David and Alex

Thu 5 Dec 2013 6:54 AM CET

The final competition is now live at http://www.twitch.tv/ggp_coursera/
Come watch and enjoy !

The event is now over, the matches will be made available online and a video will be compiled. In the meantime, you can re-view the whole event here !

Wed 4 Dec 2013 7:58 PM CET

Congratulations to all the students,

The final competition will begin in 11 hours, at 11 a.m PST. No participant has forfeited their spot, and we have manage to run successful tests with them. Everything should go smoothly, but still, let's cross our fingers.

If you want to follow the final competition, there are several things you can expect. The most straightforward one is the Forum. Posts will be updated during the whole tournament to keep track of the results. Don't hesitate to come by and drop a word of encouragement to our competitors!

Participants and spectators are also invited to come join us in a live chat over the course of the tournament, where we will discuss the ongoing matches, player strategies, and just about anything else. This will be less structured than the forums, but probably a lot of fun. For this, we will be using this web-based chat service.

And finally, there will be a live stream to show some of the games. We will not display all matches played but during the day, there will nearly always be a match on display. We expect the competition to last 6 to 9 hours, but we will make sure to warn you all when the grand final will occur. So come join us on when the stream goes live!

A little word for our competitors : Stop editing your players! Now is not the time, I can promise that your player is going to crash on a strange edge case if you do!

See you all in a few hours and may the most general better player win!

Wed 4 Dec 2013 8:59 AM CET

Every player in the top 8 (and top 16 as waiting list) should have received an email from us asking to confirm/decline their attendance to the top 8 competition event.
If you were in the top 16 at the time of the snapshot (and had 20+ matches) but did not receive an email, please let us know in this forum post asap !

For reference, here are the rankings on Monday 12/2/2013 @ noon:
1. SgianDubh - 151.41
2. Quixote - 82.25
3. LevBorovoi - 68.40
4. QFWFQ1 - 54.69
5. tjjoyn - 23.49
6. monte_carlo_tree - 19.21
7. clark_archer - 11.60
8. ceroxylon_ii - 11.1
------
9. DaddyOJjr - 10.96
10. luser - 7.04
11. Mark - 6.81
12. Jaeger - 6.6
13. JGS_Terminator - 5.84
14. A1 - 4.35
15. kakz - 1.02 (missing contact email !)
16. goateedR - 0.79

Tue 3 Dec 2013 11:31 AM CET

We are finally done. Those of you who made it this far should feel pretty good.

The Tiltyard competition is over. congratulations to our top 8. We will contact them soon to set up the final competition

Stay tuned, Wednesday at 11 a.m PST for the final competition.

And, very importantly, don't tune your players right now!

mrg

Mon 2 Dec 2013 9:00 PM CET

Hello dear students,

We are approaching the end. Tiltyard is working nonstop and we will soon crown a Coursera champion. Find all the details in this announcement!

Thu 28 Nov 2013 1:17 PM CET

It is Thanksgiving week in the US. Time to step back and think about all of the good things in life and the things for which we are grateful. Real significance - no new notes or exercises on the course this week. You may want to take this opportunity to tune and tweak your players and boost your Tiltyard score. We will be back again next week. Happy Thanksgiving.

Tiltyard is very active these days, and lots of students decided to join in. It's all in good fun, so make the jump and join us!

Mon 25 Nov 2013 9:00 PM CET

Hello,

For the final competition, student general game players will be allowed to play until Monday, December 2nd. This give you one additional week to prepare your player. The final competition were the top 8 students face each other will happen just a few days after, probably on Wednesday. Remember to register early, even if you only register the parametric player with the Legal strategy. Connecting to Tiltyard is not always trivial. See the new forum for more details

Bertrand

Wed 20 Nov 2013 9:32 PM CET

Seven weeks down and one to go. With our look at Monte Carlo methods behind us, we have now covered all of the basic techniques used in General Game Playing; and your players should now be able to play respectably and even competitively.

This week, we take a brief look at a class of more advanced techniques. The unifying theme is a representation of games in the form of propositional nets. It is possible to transform any GDL game description into a propositional net and vice versa. Given a propositional net representation for a game, it is often possible to search the game tree more efficiently. Moreover, propositional net representation facilitates game reformulation and analysis. Using this representation rather than GDL, it is often easier to discover useful structure in games and find game-specific heuristics. Importantly, these computations can be done in time proportional to the size of the propositional net rather than the size of the game tree, leading to a significant improvement in game playing.

As usual, we are releasing another set of videos, some notes, and a set of exercises dealing with propositional nets (propnets). Unlike the exercises in the past few weeks, the propnet exercises are just abstract. We are not asking you to modify your players. That said, you are welcome to do so, and doing this successfully is likely to advance your player to a qualitatively superior level of performance. However, dealing with propnets requires some work, and we do not want to force you to devote that much effort. Hence, building propnet support into your players is optional.

There is one other thing for you to do this week. Whether or not you add propnet support to your players, we would like you all to connect your players to Tiltyard so that they can compete against each other. Tiltyard is a service run by Sam Schreiber that automatically schedules and manages matches among registered general game players. Your assignment this week, should you choose to accept it, is to register your player and thereby pit your player against other players. Instructions or using Tiltyard can be accessed from the Resources menu of the Course website by clicking on the link labelled Tiltyard. A new forum has been opened, you are welcome to post any questions there.

Using Tiltyard is likely to be fun and instructive. You will get to see how your player compares to the players of others. You can improve your player and see if it improves your scores. A second advantage of using Tiltyard is that you are automatically registered for the Course's final competition. On Monday, December 2nd, we will take the top 8 scorers on Tiltyard and have them compete in a series of matches that will determine an overall winner of this year's GGP MOOC competition. Finally, working with Tiltyard will prepare you for competition on the World stage. Do well here, and you will be ready for participation in the International General Game Playing competition to be held next summer.

Next week is Thanksgiving in the US, and there will be no new material. We will be back on November 25 with some final material we will discuss in the forums the details of the final competition. See you then.

mrg and eric

Mon 18 Nov 2013 9:00 PM CET

Six weeks down and two to go. Hopefully, by this time, you have built or configured your player to do heuristic search, and hopefully you have experimented with it on various large games. If you are like me, you are probably not impressed with the results. Heuristics like mobility and goal proximity are sometimes good, but they are not good often enough to constitute the basis for a good general game player.

The good news is that there are some methods that are much more powerful. This week we look at the first of these, viz. Monte Carlo Search and its even more powerful cousin Monte Carlo Tree Search, sometimes called UCT. Monte Carlo and its variants have proven highly successful in general game playing, and virtually every general game playing program today uses some variant of Monte Carlo search. You will probably like it.

From this point on, things are going to accelerate a bit. The techniques we will be discussing are more sophisticated (but easier to understand now that you have a solid understanding of the basics). Your players will also start to perform better, much better in fact. Later this week or early next week, we will give you instructions on registering your players with Tiltyard so that that they can compete with other General Game Playing programs. In just three weeks, we will take the players with the highest Tiltyard scores and run them against each other to determine an overall winning for this offering of the course. And that same week, we will give you details on how to participate in next year's International General Game Playing Competition.

mrg

Mon 11 Nov 2013 9:00 PM CET

Okay, I messed up the announcement for last week. I had originally intended us to move faster, and I wrote the announcement on the assumption of that faster schedule. Then we decided to slow down a little, but I failed to change the announcement. My sincere apologies for the confusion. In any case, we are now back in sync. And last week's remarks now apply. Sorry for the confusion.

mrg

Sun 3 Nov 2013 7:30 PM CET

Four weeks down and four to go. By now, you should be comfortable with some of the basic methods for playing games with small game trees, and your players should be capable of perfect game play in these cases. Ideally, you should not be able to beat your players on such games.

This week, we begin our look at large games and the Heuristic Search approach to Game Playing. The specific heuristics we examine this week are not as strong as those we will be seeing in the weeks to come. (Translation: The heuristics are mostly "hacks".) However, the basic architecture of Heuristic Search programs is good, and we will see how that architecture can be used with more sophisticated General Game Playing techniques in the weeks to come.

Most importantly, this week, your will confront the problems of time management - allocating time among different tasks and making sure that your players get their moves in on before the start clock / play clock are exhausted. Time management is one of the main themes of the course. Devote enough effort to this now, and you won't stumble over it later when you have other things to worry about. Many of you will find time management frustrating. And some of you will think that it cannot be done reliably. However, this is not the case - in the International General Game Playing competitions, the top competitors never time out. (Well, almost never.)

mrg

Mon 28 Oct 2013 8:00 PM CET

End of the third week. And finally we are beginning our look at how to build General Game Playing programs. Admittedly, legal players and random players are not all that interesting. Our intent this week was not to get you to become familiar with the General Game Playing infrastructure we will be using for the rest of the course - the game manager, the parametric player, and, if you are building your own player, the Java code base. We knew that this would be easy for some of you and not so easy for others; and we wanted a simple assignment to give you plenty of time to get things set up and to experiment with the infrastructure. Hopefully, you have all managed to do that and are comfortable with using it.

This coming week, we begin our look at building game playing programs capable of playing simple single-player and multiple-player games. Things are still simple in that you do not need to worry about time limits. Although all of our matches have start clocks and play clocks, the game are small enough that your players should be able to search the corresponding game trees in the time available. This is an unrealistic assumption in general, but the methods for dealing with large games are variations on the methods used for small games. So, it is a good idea to master those methods before moving on.

As always, we want to thank those of you who have been helping others on the Forums. We all read the Forum regularly, and we respond when we can. (Okay, I was away this past week and have not been posting that much, but I am back now and will be with you all for the remainder of the course.) IN any case, in a course of this size, we have to rely on students to help each other; and we have been pleased to see so many of you responding to questions posed by others.

We know that many of you have been eager to get going on building your players. And we have been making you all slog through the details of game description. Our experience has shown that you need to be comfortable with all of that before rushing into game playing or you will find yourself lost later on. If you are comfortable with game description, great. If not, go over that material again before moving on. In any case, things are about to get interesting and will accelerate in the weeks to come. Stick with it, and I think you will find the experience educationally rewarding and a lot of fun.

mrg

Mon 21 Oct 2013 9:00 PM CEST

That's two weeks behind us. Six weeks to go. By now, you should a sense of what General Game Playing is all about; you should be able to read and write game descriptions in GDL. You should also be comfortable using the basic tools we have provided, such as Gameplayer.

This week, we talk about game management, and we begin our look at game playing. Your job this week is to create or configure your first automated game player and put it to work playing some games. In the weeks to follow, you will improve your player incrementally but inexorably. Before long, with any luck, you will have a player that should be able to beat you at various games.

We are releasing videos and notes on the week's topics. Also, all of the software you will need for the course should now be available via the Resources tab. The work this week is not that difficult. Mostly, we want you to spend your time getting comfortable with these components.

Note once again that we are providing support for two different approaches to taking the course - a parametric player and a code base written in Java. You get through the course without ever touching the Java code base, just by running the parametric player and using your browser to configure it. However, we are providing that code base for those of you who want to program your own player. You can get full credit either way you do the work.

Once again this week, the Forum was a lively place. We were pleased to see so much discussion about General Game Playing, with some people asking questions, some people providing answers, some people arguing that our answers are wrong and others defending them.

On a personal note, I would also like to thank those of you who have posted supportive messages. And those of you who have posted details about your circumstances and reasons for taking the course.

mrg


Staff update: There was a mistake in last week's Exercise 2.1 with the expected answers to the last two questions.
For more information: see this forum post

Mon 14 Oct 2013 9:00 PM CEST

One week down, seven to go. We have had a few bumps along the road this week, but by and large things seem to be going as planned. Please let us know if you have any serious problems or suggestions on how to improve things. Again, this is our first time doing GGP online, and we are still trying to get our footing.

All we have seen so far is the Introduction. The good news is that we have touched briefly on all of the main areas of the course - game description, game management, and various approaches to game playings. This is good as you hopefully see now how all of the pieces fit together. With that behind us, it is time now to get down to details.

I am sure that most of you are eager to start working on your game players, I know that some of you have already begun. Full marks for initiative. However, there are still some basics to attend to before we get to that activity.

The goal of this second week is to understand game description. We have released a set of videos on this subject. There is a chapter of the notes devoted to game description (Chapter 2). And there are some problems for you to do. We have also made available a few relevant applications. On the Resources page, you will find a simple game checker and a rudimentary game stepper. The former checks for common errors in game descriptions (such as unsafe rules), and the latter allows you to go through a match step by step. They are not very slick, but they are useful.

Next week, we will look game management and we will begin our look at game playing. We will create or configure our first automated game players and put them to work playing some games. In the weeks to follow, we will improve our players incrementally but inexorably. Before long, with any luck, you will have a player that should be able to beat you at various games. Just be sure you understand game description first, then you are welcome to gallop ahead.

mrg

Mon 7 Oct 2013 9:00 PM CEST

Okay. We are on our way! First week of class begins now.

This week, your goal is to master the material in lesson 1. This should not be too hard. The lesson is mostly overview. That said, you should not shortchange the material. This lesson talks about the main ideas of General Game Playing and how they relate to each other, and it provides a framework for organizing the rest of the material in the course. This week, you should also master the art of doing exercises, and you should figure out how to use the Discussion Forum.

A word about materials in the course. Everything you need to take the course is available here. The notes and software are all free. Due to copyright restrictions, you may need to pay for some of the Background readings. (Clicking on the links on the References page will take you to a site where you can purchase and retrieve the papers.) These readings are not essential, but they are helpful. Use your judgment, but do not feel obliged to purchase the papers.

Finally, a word about certificates. We will be issuing certificates of accomplishment to all students who complete the course with a cumulative grade of 70% on all exercises. Occasionally, we will post exercises marked "Optional". Doing these exercises can increase your cumulative score but does not increase the reference score for the course (400 points). So, doing these exercises can help you but failing to do them cannot hurt you.

mrg

Mon 30 Sep 2013 9:00 PM CEST

We are happy to have you join us for this course on General Game Playing (GGP). GGP is an interesting application in its own right. It is intellectually engaging and more than a little fun. But it is much more than that. It provides a theoretical framework for modeling discrete dynamic systems and for defining rationality in a way that takes into account problem representation and complexities like incompleteness of information and resource bounds. It has practical applications in areas where these features are important, e.g. in business and law. More fundamentally, it raises questions about the nature of intelligence and serves as a laboratory in which to evaluate competing approaches to artificial intelligence.

We have been teaching General Game Playing for a number of years, but this is the first time we are offering the course in this online format. The online format poses significant challenges for you as students since it requires you to create, run, and evaluate computer programs on your own. You can do this by writing such programs in your favorite programming language, such as Java; or, if you are not up to that, you can do this by downloading and running an app that allows you to use your web browser to configure a preprogrammed general game player in various ways.

The course consists of ten lessons on different aspects of General Game Playing. Each lesson consists of several sections, each with its own video and notes and exercises, and there is set of exercises per lesson. Our intent is to proceed through one or two lessons each week, which means you need to view 1-3 hours of video and do one or two exercise sets each week.

In addition to these lessons, the course contains ancillary readings and material on advanced topics for those of you who want to explore beyond the primary material of the course. This additional material is not required. However, you are encouraged to look at these materials as they reinforce and extend the course in interesting ways.

Importantly, throughout the course, you should take advantage of the discussion forum to communicate with your fellow students and with the instructors. Use the forum to ask questions, answer questions, and add additional material to the course.

By the time you are done, you should have a good grasp of the basic techniques used in most General Game Playing programs. You will also have a working game player, and you will be able to try your player out in various online General Game Playing arenas. You may even want to register your player for the International General Game Playing Competition.

The course begins officially on September 30. You should study the first lesson during the first week and do the corresponding exercises by the end of the week. If you miss the deadline, don't worry - you can still submit your work until the end of the course.

We hope the course will be a rewarding, educational, and entertaining experience for you. We are sure that it will be a learning experience for us; and we are looking forward to working with you.

mrg

Sat 30 Jun 2012 7:47 PM CEST