200 Students Can't Be Wrong! GamesCrafters, a Computational Game Theory Undergraduate Research and Development Group at UC Berkeley

Daniel D. Garcia
University of California, Berkeley
ddgarcia@cs.berkeley.edu

PPT (3 MB), PDF (1 MB), 6-up PDF Handout (1 MB)

2007-11-13 @ 12:00 - 13:00 EST
University of Melbourne
Theatre 3 (Room 2.05) ICT
111 Barry St, Carlton, AUSTRALIA

Abstract

The UC Berkeley GamesCrafters research and development group was formed in 2001 as a "watering hole" to gather and engage top undergraduates as they explore the fertile area of computational game theory. At the core of the project is GAMESMAN, a system developed for solving, playing and analyzing two-person, abstract strategy games (e.g., Tic-Tac-Toe or Chess). Given the description of a game as input, our system generates a text-based and Tcl/Tk graphical application that will strongly solve it, and then play it perfectly. Programmers can easily prototype a new game with multiple rule variants, learn the strategy, and perform extended analysis. Over the past six years, more than seventy games have been integrated into the system by over one hundred fifty undergraduates, with still more games in development. Our future research direction is "hunting big game" -- implementing, solving, and analyzing games whose perfect strategy is yet unknown.

References

GamesCrafters home page
EECS Research Summary 2008 writeup
Chen, Yanpei; Fong, Patricia C.; Hong, Jerry; Mahajan, Deepa; Okita, Cynthia; Poll, David Eitan; Roytman, Alan; Sadgat, Ofer and Garcia, Daniel D. 200 Students Can't Be Wrong! GamesCrafters, a Computational Game Theory Undergraduate Research and Development Group at UC Berkeley AAAI Spring Symposium 2008 : "Using AI to motivate greater participation in Computer Science", Stanford, CA, March 26-28, 2008.

Dan Garcia (ddgarcia@cs.berkeley.edu)