Game Description Language for MTG ?

by **decked** » 08 Oct 2013, 04:55

GDL 'Game Description Language' describes the state of a game as a series of facts, and the game mechanics as logical rules.

Has anyone tried to do any work with MTG and GDL? It seems like it could be good common platform for MTG playing AI, as well as a foundation for rule enforcing engines.

(I would provide instructive links but I am new and urls are banned for new users. It is easy to find resources with a quick search.)

by **Huggybaby** » 08 Oct 2013, 06:05

Links are enabled after five posts. In the meantime, add a space or something to obfuscate the link, or leave out the http, it's easy enough to do.

Thanks for the interesting topic!

by **silly freak** » 08 Oct 2013, 06:32

I would be intereseted in some links indeed! I didn't know there was something as specific as a GDL. I'll certainly look into it.

by **Hellfish** » 08 Oct 2013, 08:43

I believe this is the link referenced: http://games.stanford.edu/gdl.html

Take this post with a grain of salt as I'm just a happy amateur in the field, but I'm skeptical. I don't see how this would work with randomness (next(p) relation), for instance.The relative ease of going infinite in a variety of ways probably doesn't help either.

by **decked** » 08 Oct 2013, 18:10

Hellfish wrote:Take this post with a grain of salt as I'm just a happy amateur in the field, but I'm skeptical. I don't see how this would work with randomness (next(p) relation), for instance.The relative ease of going infinite in a variety of ways probably doesn't help either.

I am also skeptical if GDL would work with MTG. I think the randomness could be handled with standard language extensions, but I do not know if MTG could work within the language constraints to prevent infinite recursion.
see
http:(slash)(slash)www(dot)wikipedia(dot)org(slash)wiki(slash)General_game_playing
and
http:(slash)(slash)www(dot)ggp(dot)org

I have also learned that a Coursera course has just started on General Game Playing and the focus of the sylabus is using GDL to describe games and writing clients to play those games. This could be a great resource to test this out and might be of interest to this community in general.
See http:(slash)(slash)www(dot)coursera(dot)org(slash)course(slash)ggp

by **nharding** » 13 Mar 2015, 22:08

I started to write an automatic code generator, that would parse the Oracle text to produce skeletal code that could then be modified. The problem is that when the make changes to the code, that it is not overwritten the next time you parse the data (to add a new set for example). I planned on using "virtual" functions (not true virtual function since I wanted to be able to modify them dynamically, so function pointers and macros).