General Game Playing in AI Research and Education

Introduced in 2005 as a new AI Challenge and Competition, general game playing has quickly evolved into an established research area. More recently it is also gaining popularity as a useful addition to AI curricula at universities around the world. The first part of this paper will survey the research landscape of general game playing, which covers a broad range of classic AI topics, including knowledge representation, search, planning and learning. The second part will argue that general game playing provides a unique approach to teaching a number of different topics such as problem solving by search, logic, logic programming and planning. The inherent competitive aspect also can be used as a great motivator for students to design and implement their own AI systems.