General game playing

General game playing (GGP) is the design of artificial intelligence programs to be able to play more than one game successfully. For many games like chess, computers are programmed to play these games using a specially designed algorithm, which cannot be transferred to another context. For instance, a chess-playing computer program cannot play checkers. General game playing is considered as a necessary milestone on the way to artificial general intelligence. General video game playing (GVGP) is the concept of GGP adjusted to the purpose of playing video games. For video games, game rules have to be either learnt over multiple iterations by artificial players like TD-Gammon, or are predefined manually in a domain-specific language and sent in advance to artificial players like in traditional GGP. Starting in 2013, significant progress was made following the deep reinforcement learning approach, including the development of programs that can learn to play Atari 2600 games as well as a program that can learn to play Nintendo Entertainment System games. The first commercial usage of general game playing technology was Zillions of Games in 1998. General game playing was also proposed for trading agents in supply chain management thereunder price negotiation in online auctions from 2003 on. In 1992, Barney Pell defined the concept of Meta-Game Playing, and developed the "MetaGame" system. This was the first program to automatically generate game rules of chess-like games, and one of the earliest programs to use automated game generation. Pell then developed the system Metagamer. This system was able to play a number of chess-like games, given game rules definition in a special language called Game Description Language (GDL), without any human interaction once the games were generated. In 1998, the commercial system Zillions of Games was developed by Jeff Mallett and Mark Lefler. The system used a LISP-like language to define the game rules. Zillions of Games derived the evaluation function automatically from the game rules based on piece mobility, board structure and game goals.