METAGAME 2.0

Appeared in Volume 6/1, February 1993

Keywords: games, machine learning.

Announcing the availability of the latest version of the METAGAME workbench. This system supports the development and playing of metagame programs, and may be of particular interest to researchers in computer game-playing and machine learning.

This release contains the following:

a generator for symmetric Chess-like games
definitions of chess, checkers, chinese_chess, shogi, lose_chess, lose_checkers, french_checkers, tic_tac_toe translated into symmetric chess-like games.
a text interface for generating and playing games, with extensive help menus and move completion.
a legal move generator
simple legal players: INSTANT, RANDOM, CAUTIOUS, RANDOM_AGGRESSIVE
a sophisticated player: ITERATE
efficient indexing, for fast search and pattern matching.
game clock / timing facilities
portability: this workbench can be used in Quintus or Sictus Prolog.

With all this, it is easy to develop legal game-playing programs to play many different games. From there, you can just insert your favorite search, learning, and/or analysis methods, and compete in a tournament against the built-in opponents or other members of the game-playing and machine learning communities.

I would appreciate any feedback concerning the system and its use. I will try to be responsive to any comments, requests, bug, etc.

Barney Pell
Computer Laboratory
New Museum Site, Pembroke Street
Cambridge CB2 3QG, UK
Email: Barney.Pell@cl.cam.ac.uk
Tel: +44 223 334 602
Fax: +44 223 334 678

The metagame system is implemented in SICStus Prolog, version 2.1, which is available by email at: sicstus-request@sics.se. This new release also supports Quintus Prolog.

Anonymous FTP:
ftp://ftp.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/bdp/metagame.tar.Z

Also available are two (somewhat outdated) papers on Metagame:
metagame.ps.Z, Metagame: A New Challenge for Games and Learning
chess-like.ps.Z, Metagame in Symmetric Chess-Like Games

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