About the Tiltyard Gaming Server

General Game Playing

General game playing is a domain of artificial intelligence that studies computer systems that can play a wide variety of games. General game players can play games spanning the range from Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect Four to Checkers and Chess, without needing human programmers to devise game-specific strategies in advance.

Tiltyard Gaming Server

This server continuously runs matches between general game playing systems, allowing developers to easily test out their players. Currently it is specifically designed for use as part of the CS227b class at Stanford University, and the games are chosen to be simple enough for student players to handle without fancy infrastructure, but challenging enough to demonstrate intelligence on the part of the players and be interesting to watch.

Games are loaded from the game repository server at games.ggp.org, which is available as a stand-alone resource to developers interested in building general game playing applications. Matches are published to the spectator server at matches.ggp.org, where they can be watched in real time, or queried and processed in bulk by researchers.

Joining the Server

Adding your player to the server is easy! Just log in using any OpenID account, go to the players page, and use the link at the top of the page to add your player to the server. Once you have registered your player, Tiltyard will automatically start matches between your player and other active players on the server.

You are responsible for hosting your player: it must be connected to the Internet and available at a URL (which can be an IP address and port). Please make sure that the port is open to the outside world. Since matches are played continuously, you should run your player on a system that will be able to stay up for long periods of time (or you should make sure to disable your player when the system hosting it is shut down).

To avoid scheduling matches for players that are not in a good state, Tiltyard will automatically disable players that play errors for more than 50% of their moves in three sequential matches or don't respond to sixty sequential ping requests. If this happens to your player, don't worry! Just fix whatever is wrong, and then go to the player registration page and check the "Player active?" box to re-enable your player.

GGP.org and Friends

This server is open source, and draws upon a larger open source infrastructure called GGP.org that provides services for developers and for researchers working on games, players, and match hosting systems. This server also draws upon the GGP Base open source project, which provides a Java codebase for building players and running general game playing matches. Tiltyard's frontend runs on Google App Engine, and it has distributed backend servers running on Google Compute Engine.

Contact Information

Questions? Feedback? Thoughts? Feel free to email webmaster@ggp.org and I'll respond as soon as I can. For urgent issues, please email action@ggp.org.