Oyun: Documentation

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Getting started


To get a tournament going in Oyun, you’ll need to (i) write a set of players, (ii) load them up, and (iii) run a tournament of your choice.

Writing Players

Tournaments in Oyun can be run with two different sorts of players: built-in players and external players written as finite state machines. There are only two sorts of built-in players available: one player which makes random moves, and one which plays the tit-for-tat strategy.

If you want to write a player, you’ll need to learn the Oyun finite state machine format. A finite state machine is like a very simple programming language. In this format, you tell your player which move to make, and then how to respond to moves made by its opponent.

Let’s move to some more concrete explanation. First of all, a finite state machine is just a text file that looks like the following:

Machine Author
Machine Name
Number of states
State 0
State 1
...
State N-1

A few things to note: the machine author and machine name are not optional. Further, which will be important later, the states are numbered starting with zero.

Each state in the state machine looks like this:

<move>, <next state if opponent moves C>, <next state if opponent moves D>

So you can now see how play works for a finite state machine. The player begins in state 0, making the move specified by that state. On the next turn, it looks to see what move its opponent made on the previous turn. Depending on this move, it decides which state to switch to. It then makes the move specified in that new state, and the process continues.

Here’s an example. A finite state machine version of the tit-for-tat strategy would look like this:

Charles Pence
Tit for Tat
2
C, 0, 1
D, 0, 1

As specified, the player was written by me, and its name is “Tit for Tat.” It has two states. Play begins in state 0, and the player chooses to cooperate. If the opponent cooperates, our player will continue to cooperate (that is, it will stay in state 0). If the opponent defects, our player will switch to state 1. When it gets there, it will defect. Again, in this state, it will copy the move of its opponent.

More examples of finite state machine players are available on the wiki at the Oyun website.

Loading Players

Load the players you’ve written on the first page of Oyun. You can also drag and drop finite state machine text files onto the Oyun window. If there are any syntax errors or invalid states in your finite state machine (did you remember that the first state is state 0 and not state 1?), Oyun will warn you upon loading the file.

Click “Next” to continue.

Running a Tournament

You now need to choose which type of tournament to run. You can either choose a round-robin (or “one-shot”) tournament, in which each player plays every other player for a total five games, and the winner is the player which accumulates the highest score, or you can choose an evolutionary tournament, in which the players seed an initial “population,” and their scores against one another are used to determine their percentage in the next “generation.” For more information on these two tournament types, see the documentation under “Oyun Task Pages” for the “One-Shot Tournament” and the “Evolutionary Tournament.”

Finally, depending on which tournament you have run, there will be several options for how you can save the results – for a one-shot tournament, you can save a spreadsheet of results or a word-processor document detailing the moves each player made throughout, and for an evolutionary tournament, you can save a spreadsheet of the contents of the population at each generation, or the graph of the results in a variety of image formats.

Hopefully this is enough information to get you started using Oyun! For more information on any of these steps, see the detailed documentation under “Oyun Task Pages” above.