The international general game playing competition

Games have played a prominent role as a test bed for advancements in the field of artificial intelligence ever since its foundation over half a century ago, resulting in highly specialized world-class game-playing systems being developed for various games. The establishment of the International General Game Playing Competition in 2005, however, resulted in a renewed interest in more general problem-solving approaches to game playing. In general game playing (GGP) the goal is to create gameplaying systems that autonomously learn how to play a wide variety of games skillfully, given only the descriptions of the game rules. In this paper we review the history of the competition, discuss progress made so far, and list outstanding research challenges.