General Game Playing

General game players are agents able to play strategy games based solely on formal game descriptions supplied at run time. In other words, they do not know the rules until the game starts! Unlike specialized game players, such as Deep Blue, general game players cannot rely on algorithms designed in advance for specific games; they must discover such algorithms themselves. General game playing expertise depends on intelligence on the part of the game player rather than intelligence of the programmer of the game player. General game players are computer systems capable of playing strategy games based solely on game descriptions supplied at "runtime." While general game playing is intellectually engaging and fun, it also serves as a laboratory for practical applications, and provides a theoretical framework for defining rationality in a way that takes into account problem representation, incompleteness of information, and resource bounds.