A STRATEGIC METAGAME PLAYER FOR GENERAL CHESS-LIKE GAMES

This paper introduces METAGAMER, the first program designed within the paradigm of Metagame-playing (Metagame). This program plays games in the class of symmetric chess-like games, which includes chess, Chinese chess, checkers, draughts, and Shogi. METAGAMER takes as input the ru les of a specific game and analyzes those rules to construct an effici ent representation and an evaluation function for that game; they are used by a generic search engine. The strategic analysis performed by M ETAGAMER relates a set of general knowledge sources to the details of the particular game. Among other properties, this analysis determines the relative value of the different pieces in a given game. Although M ETAGAMER does not learn from experience, the values resulting from its analysis are qualitatively similar to values used by experts on known games and are sufficient to produce competitive performance the first time METAGAMER plays a new game. Besides being the first Metagame-pla ying program, this is the first program to have derived useful piece v alues directly from analysis of the rules of different games. This pap er describes the knowledge implemented in METAGAMER, illustrates the p iece values METAGAMER derives for chess and checkers, and discusses ex periments with METAGAMER on both existing and newly generated games.