Repairing General Game Descriptions (extended version)

2025-08-14

AI Summary

To address the error-proneness of Game Description Language (GDL) rules, the difficulty of manual correction, and the absence of support for minimal repair, this paper formally defines “minimal repair” as an automated error-correction task for violations of GDL logical constraints. Methodologically, we propose an Answer Set Programming (ASP)-based modeling framework that integrates automated theorem proving for both error detection and repair generation, and systematically analyze the computational complexity of associated decision and optimization problems. Our main contributions are: (1) the first formal definition and problem formulation of minimal repair for GDL; (2) a scalable, non-expert-friendly automated repair tool; and (3) empirical evaluation on diverse defective GDL instances, demonstrating that our approach consistently generates semantically preserving repairs with minimal syntactic modifications.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Automated Reasoning and Theorem Proving
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

The Game Description Language (GDL) is a widely used formalism for specifying the rules of general games. Writing correct GDL descriptions can be challenging, especially for non-experts. Automated theorem proving has been proposed to assist game design by verifying if a GDL description satisfies desirable logical properties. However, when a description is proved to be faulty, the repair task itself can only be done manually. Motivated by the work on repairing unsolvable planning domain descriptions, we define a more general problem of finding minimal repairs for GDL descriptions that violate formal requirements, and we provide complexity results for various computational problems related to minimal repair. Moreover, we present an Answer Set Programming-based encoding for solving the minimal repair problem and demonstrate its application for automatically repairing ill-defined game descriptions.

Problem

• Finding minimal repairs for faulty GDL descriptions
• Addressing challenges in correcting game rule specifications
• Automating repair of ill-defined game descriptions using ASP

Innovation

• Minimal repairs for faulty GDL descriptions
• Answer Set Programming-based encoding solution
• Automated repair of ill-defined game rules