GameTable • COST ACTION CA22145 – Computational Techniques for Tabletop Games Heritage

To provide answers to the research problems, to ensure progress beyond the state-of-the-art, and to encourage novel approaches and methods, GameTable is organised into 5 interconnected Working Groups (WGs) that cover the key challenges and interact with the other groups on common research goals and questions. Each of these bring together the main disciplines represented in the Action and provide a new platform for stakeholders to collaborate. Specifically, GameTable’s WGs are:

Leader

Document

A WG1 description is available here

Objectives

Improve the AI search, planning, and learning techniques to play more efficiently to any tabletop games and to develop explainable approaches able to be helpful for the study of games.

Tasks & Activities

(i) to develop AI approaches that play in more diverse ways that are more reminiscent of human play;
(ii) to organize workshops/training schools to share promising and best practices;
(iii) to consult on the kinds of experiments required by WG2 and perform them, and to further identify potential research questions;
(iv) to organize short-term exchange/cross visits;
(v) to develop and extend the teaching of the most modern AI approaches to Bachelor and Master students by applying them on games;
(vi) to improve the efficiency of general Game AI approaches in coordinating the research efforts of the wide diversity of the AI researchers belonging to this network. Designing techniques to automatically infer, discover, and learn the knowledge needed by the agents to perform better will be one of the research directions. Another will be the development of generic approaches for tabletop games, such as Portfolio or Ensemble Decision System, able to efficiently use all recently-developed state-of-the-art techniques and methods.
(vii) to bring the notion of explainability to AI techniques for game playing, and design algorithms able to efficiently compare the strategies and tactics played by each AI agent to the strategies played by humans;
(viii) to define a proper general representation of imperfect-information games and define new approaches based on new learning models capable of discovering and playing efficient strategies;

WG Communication

https://groups.google.com/g/gametable-ai

Deliverables

(i) contribution of content, guidelines, links and tools to the Action website;
(ii) innovative AI approaches;
(iii) prototypes and data resulting from training schools/workshops;
(iv) seminars/workshops for partners and stakeholders;
(v) presentations/seminars at external conferences and events;
(vi) publications in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings
(vii) final paper on future challenges and avenues for research;

Members

The list of this Working Group’s members can be found on e-COST.

To apply for a Working Group, please first register at e-COST and apply here: https://e-services.cost.eu/action/CA22145/working-groups/apply. Your application will be assessed by the Working Group Leader and the Action Chair. We aim to respond to you within 3 weeks.

Leader

Document

A WG2 description is available here

Objectives

Brings together scholars specialising in various regions spanning the globe from prehistory to the present day. Its main goals are to develop new applications to the study of games past and present, to identify critically endangered and lost cultural heritage of games, and strategise ways to preserve them.

Tasks & Activities

(i) contribution of content, guidelines, links and tools to the Action website;
(ii) to provide insights on the motivations and choices that people make during the course of playing, and evaluate the variability in such approaches across cultures and time periods.;
(iii) to explore ways to use traditional methods of material culture and textual analysis to identify observations that could be tested with playout experiments;
(iv) to produce booklets on games and history to be used in schools, the games studied by researchers in WG2 and involving mathematical aspects will be shared with WG4;
(v) to provide information on what is known about particular games with incomplete rulesets to be reconstructed
(vi) to examine explainability for reconstruction purposes and to identify the strategies played by AIs which can either be corroborated with what is known from texts about a game, or as a way of ruling out or confirming a particular ruleset as a likely reconstruction based on the expectations of human play;
(vii) to study imperfect-information games such as cards and dominoes because of their widespread use throughout human history, though they appear to have separate histories from board games;
(viii) to determine how mathematics are used in games and what the evidence from history and archaeology can tell us about the use of mathematics in the games of past societies;

WG Communication

https://groups.google.com/g/gametable-cultural

Members

The list of this Working Group’s members can be found on e-COST.

Leader

Objectives

The design of methods able to reconstruct the missing rules of incomplete traditional games, and to generate new high-quality games and new expansions for existing games for commercial use.

Tasks & Activities

(i) contribution of content, guidelines, links and tools to the Action website;
(ii) reconstruction of ancient games from partial historical evidence in providing sophisticated techniques for generating possible rules based on the knowledge provided;
(iii) to organize short-term exchange/cross visits;
(iv) to improve the quality of education by the development of software programs able to help to generate and evaluate the games used for educational purposes;
(v) to concentrate the research skills of its members to develop new algorithms automatically generating high-quality and original tabletop games with a particular interest for commercial use.;
(vi) to focus on the generation of new puzzles and new content for existing puzzles in investigating the psychology of what makes games and puzzles interesting for players;
(vii) to contribute on the reconstruction of any traditional tabletop games through the development of a general game system in collaboration with WG1;
(viii) to perform experiments in reconstructing games that may identify mathematical principles that must have existed in certain games.

Deliverables

(i) contribution to the website;
(ii) Release of reconstructed rulesets;
(iii) Release of automatically generated high-quality board games and puzzles;
(iv) presentations/seminars at external conferences and events;
(v) peer-reviewed publications.

WG Communication

https://groups.google.com/g/gametable-pcg

Members

The list of this Working Group’s members can be found on e-COST.

Leaders

Document

A WG4 description is available here

Objectives

(i) Share Mathematical Methodologies from the various disciplines;
(ii) Present Case Studies in Mathematical Game Studies;
(iii) Connect and highlight researchers doing work on games and mathematics;

Tasks & Activities

The main goal of this WG is to share mathematical work related to games in order to understand the inner- and interconnections between games and mathematics. We are interested both in how people in the mathematics world(s) study games (which mathematical tools or concepts are required to find strategies), but also how people in the game world use mathematics in games (for game design for instance). Many different branches of mathematics are involved in games’ analysis, concerned with different aspects of play, such as rulesets, game space, pieces, strategies & tactics, players, and among others. For instance if a game has perfect information, random elements, zero to multiple players, simultaneous moves or not, etc. Any field of mathematics is considered relevant: set theory; number theory; graph theory; combinatorial game theory; probabilities; statistics; game theory; topology; cryptography, etc.
The study of singular mathematical objects - games - allow us to deepen our knowledge in mathematics: it is not frozen in time, it is a human intellectual enterprise with a long history and an active, and understanding these processes of knowledge production is essential for current teaching.
Members of this WG show particular interest in:

Algorithms and methodologies to study games and how to mediate its mathematics
Break down games into properties (game states, etc.)
Variability and stability of games
Interplay between the histories of games and of mathematics

Projected Outputs

(i) Summer Schools on Mathematics in Games;
(ii) Articles from the WG4 network in diverse journals;
(iii) Dedicated issue in the Recreational Mathematics Magazine;
(iv) Curated Editorial of Relevant publications related to the topic.

WG Communication

https://groups.google.com/g/gametable-maths

Members

The list of this Working Group’s members can be found on e-COST.

Leaders

Objectives

aims to connect all the other WGs and to implement new tools based on the solutions developed through the Action. Collaboration between endusers and researchers/developers ensures the right line of research and increases the chance that the developed tools meet the performance criteria, are fit-for-purpose and will actually be used and accepted by all the relevant communities (relevant researchers, educators, and the public). This WG will also be in charge of the dissemination aspect, maximising the impact of the Action on the general public, and finding cultural and industrial partners.

Tasks & Activities

(i) execute the Dissemination Plan assuring the main activities, events, outcomes, deliverables of all WGs have the most optimal visibility and reach the relevant stakeholders;
(ii) coordinate the development of the general game system so that it is user-friendly and can be used by researchers outside of computer science as well as by the public;
(iii) targeting partner institutions and organisations;
(iv) organisation of educational events, including training schools (TS) and meetings;
(v) creation of different tutorials and videos released on social media channels to promote the results and to make easier use of the AI-based tools produced;
(vi) target meetings with museums: workshops, classes, other programming events with local cultural heritage and games organisations;
(vii) Connect heritage education and game-based learning related activities within Europe and share experience, methodology and best practices;
(viii) production of booklets, videos and tutorials on games, history and mathematics for teacher training, both in primary and in secondary schools;
(ix) organisation of the final conference;
(x) creation of a digital exhibition on applications of Game AI to traditional games.

Deliverables

(i) release of an open source general game system incorporating the innovations developed by WG1 and WG3 members;
(ii) production of educational materials such as booklets;
(iii) development of a digital exhibition to highlight the methods and results of the Action for a public audience.;
(iv) booklets, videos and tutorials on games;
(v) production of interdisciplinary scientific papers in cooperation with all WGs.

WG Communication

https://groups.google.com/g/gametable-dissemination

Members

The list of this Working Group’s members can be found on e-COST.

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See Also

01

Management Committee

02

Core Group

03

Working Groups

COST

ACTION CA22145

Action Details