Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LUDEME (The Digital Ludeme Project: Modelling the Evolution of Traditional Games)

Teaser

The development of games goes hand in hand with the development of human culture. Games offer a rich window of insight into our cultural past, but early examples were rarely documented and our understanding of them is incomplete. While there has been considerable historical...

Summary

The development of games goes hand in hand with the development of human culture. Games offer a rich window of insight into our cultural past, but early examples were rarely documented and our understanding of them is incomplete. While there has been considerable historical research into games and their use as tools of cultural analysis, much is based on the interpretation of partial evidence with little mathematical analysis. Can we use modern computational techniques to help fill these gaps in our knowledge empirically?

Representing games as structured sets of ludemes (units of game-related in- formation) allows the full range of traditional strategy games to be modelled in a single software system. The Ludii general game system, being developed as part of the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project, not only models and plays games, but will evaluate reconstructions for quality and authenticity, and automatically improve them where possible. This work constitutes a new field of study called Digital Archaeoludology (DAL), which draws together concepts from a diverse range of disciplines including Computer Science, History, Mathematics, Archaeology, Anthropology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, among others.

The ludemic model reveals innate mathematical relationships between games, allowing phylogenetic analysis. This provides a mechanism for creating a family tree/network of traditional games, which could reveal missing links and allow ancestral state reconstruction to shed light on the gaps in our partial knowledge. Locating ludemes culturally provides a mechanism for charting the transmission of games (and associated mathematical ideas) throughout history. DAL seeks to bridge the gap between historical and computational studies of games, to provide greater insight into our understanding of them as cultural artefacts, and to pioneer new tools and techniques for their continued analysis.

Work performed

The Project’s first 18 months have progressed on schedule and key milestones have been met. These include the implementation of the Ludii general game system and the public release of a prototype version at the Advances in Computer Games conference in Macao in July 2019.

The Project’s first international symposium was held in April 2019 at the Leibniz Center for Informatics (Germany) in the form of a Schloss Dagstuhl Research Meeting. This two-day event was attended by 20 world leading scholars in the Project’s various fields of interest, including most of the Project’s Advisory Panel. The resulting technical report Foundations of Digital Archaeoludology was picked up by the popular technical press and led to feature articles in MIT Technology Review, VICE, Atlas Obscura, and others.

The Project has enjoyed public interest from the start with coverage in local and national newspapers, national and international radio, local TV, invited talks at various events associated with the Host Institution, and several invited public lectures at international venues. The PI and team members have presented 19 conference papers on the Project in this period (including 12 proceedings papers) and written 2 journal papers. The Project has inspired related research projects for almost 30 Masters students at the Host Institution, including two research internships.

Final results

\"The software tool being developed for the research, called Ludii, extends the state of the art in the fields of Game AI and more specifically General Game Playing (GGP). It allows the full range of traditional strategy games to be modelled in a single playable database for the first time, potentially opening up many new research opportunities for researchers and practitioners ii these areas. Apart from its research potential, being primarily a tool for game design, Ludii also has potential side-benefits to industry and hobbyists in the rapidly growing field of Procedural Content Generation (PCG), especially in its capacity for automated play-testing and automating much if not all of the game design process. The Ludii system is currently in a late beta pre-release phase, with its official public launch planned for January 2020.

Ludii extends the scope of games that can be modelled computationally. While existing game systems have trouble modelling games more complex than the traditional board game Go (game tree complexity ~10^360) we have computationally modelled the traditional board game Taikyoku Shogi (game tree complexity ~10^9,165), which to our knowledge has not been achieved before for any game even remotely as complex as this pathological case. This implementation was achieved with a few days\' work, rather than the months or even years that would be required to implement this game in other available systems, if that were even feasible.

The evidence database being built as part of the research will provide the world\'s most comprehensive catalogue of evidence for traditional strategy games throughout recorded human history. Having this information readily available in a standardised public database will be a boon for traditional games scholars worldwide, including Historians, Archaeologists, Anthropologists, Ethnologists, Mathematical Historians, etc. This resource, in conjunction with the Ludii tool, will provide a powerful research platform.

Another contribution of the project so far has been to launch the new research field of Digitaql Archaeoludology. This has been achieved by: initially assembling the leading international experts in the relevant research areas in the project\'s Advisory Panel and stimulating their interest the project; running an international Dagstuhl Research Meeting on \"\"Foundation of Digitial Archaeoludology\"\" at the renown Leibniz Centre for Informatics; significant public outreach through social media, national and international radio, national TV, newspapers, magazines, etc., and regular public talks and visits with potential collaborators and interested parties.

Expected results until the end of the project include new tools and methods pioneered in this project for the analysis of game-based evidence from new perspectives, potentially offering new insights into the development of human cultures worldwide throughout recorded history. An expected side-benefit will be a corpus of reconstructions of ancient and early games from partial and unreliable evidence, with greater confidence in their historical and mathematical legitimacy than is currently possible. The project will harness the extensive evidence database being compiled for phylogenetic analyses to help impute missing evidence and yield \"\"family trees\"\" of the main categories of games, which themselves could potentially yield interesting cultural and historical insights through these new lines of enquiry that the project makes possible.\"

Website & more info

More info: http://ludeme.eu.