Digital Ludeme Project

The Digital Ludeme Project is an ERC-funded project that I am working on as PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Cameron Browne at Maastricht University’s Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering.

Summary from project page: “This project is a computational study of the world’s traditional strategy games throughout recorded human history. It aims to improve our understanding of traditional games using modern AI techniques, to chart their historical development and explore their role in the development of human culture and the spread of mathematical ideas.”

My personal focus is on AI techniques, including search and learning algorithms, within the context of the project.

Project outputs (involving me as author):

Ludii v0.6.0 (download here)
Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Walter Crist and Cameron Browne (2019). “Report on the Digital Ludeme Project”. ICGA Journal, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 138-142. IOS Press.
Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson and Cameron Browne (August 12, 2019). “Ludii User Guide”. Pre-release version.
Matthew Stephenson, Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2019). “Ludii as a Competition Platform”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2019), pp. 634–641. [pdf]
Matthew Stephenson, Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2019). “An Overview of the Ludii General Game System”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2019), pp. 864–865. [pdf]
Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2019). “An Empirical Evaluation of Two General Game Systems: Ludii and RBG”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2019), pp. 626–629. [pdf]
Cédric Piette, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2019). “Ludii and XCSP: Playing and Solving Logic Puzzles”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2019), pp. 630–633. [pdf]
Cameron Browne, Matthew Stephenson, Éric Piette, and Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2019). “A Practical Introduction to the Ludii General Game System”. In Proceedings of Advances in Computer Games (ACG’19), Macau, Springer, August 2019.
Cameron Browne, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Michael Conrad, Walter Crist, Thierry Depaulis, Eddie Duggan, Fred Horn, Steven Kelk, Simon M. Lucas, João Pedro Neto, David Parlett, Abdallah Saffidine, Ulrich Schädler, Jorge Nuno Silva, Alex de Voogt, and Mark H. M. Winands (2019). “Foundations of Digital Archæoludology”. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.13516. [pdf]
Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, and Cameron Browne (2019). “Learning Policies from Self-Play with Policy Gradients and MCTS Value Estimates”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2019), pp. 329–336. Runner-up Best Paper Award. [pdf] [pdf (preprint)]
Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Matthew Stephenson, Chiara F. Sironi, Mark H.M. Winands, and Cameron Browne (2019). “Ludii - The Ludemic General Game System”. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.05013. [pdf]
Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, and Cameron Browne (2019). “Biasing MCTS with Features for General Games”. In 2019 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2019), pp. 442–449. [pdf (preprint)]
Cameron Browne, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Eric Piette (2019). “Strategic Features for General Games”. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Knowledge Extraction from Games (KEG), pp. 70–75. [pdf] [pdf mirror]

Project funded by European Research Council (ERC):

Dennis Soemers