CS227B: General Game Playing

Form a team for the programming assignments and contents. (Teams of tree people are strongly preferred, but teams with two or four people are okay if there are good reasons.) Invent a name for your team. Be creative. (Some team names from the past: The Resolutionaries, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Team Camembert, and my personal favorite Michael Genesereth.) Decide what platform you will be using, i.e. what hardware and what program language.

• +20 points for successfully aligned with a team by the end of lecture.
• -10 points for selecting Michael Genesereth as your team name.

Consider the state machine model for games. Cite a commercial game that cannot be readily modeled in this way and briefly explain why.

• +20 points for identifying either a game with a continuous state space:

  "A game like basketball can not be readily modeled by a state machine because each player's position is defined on a continuous specture and hence would need an infinite number of states to encode all the positions that the players could be in. (Delusions of Adequacy)"

  or a game with a non-deterministic component:

  "Poker is a game that cannot be readily modeled this way because of the randomness and non-determinism of the game... [which] come from the cards being shuffled. (Perverse Incentives)"

• +10 points for well thought out responses that didn't quite get there.

Game Classification

• +2 points for each correct answer.
• Diplomacy and Bughouse Chess were accepted in two different positions.

+20 points for a reasonable and insightful response