A Strategic Metagame Player
for General Chess-Like Games

This paper reviews the concept of Metagame and discusses the implementation of METAGAMER, a program which plays Metagame in the class of symmetric chess-like games, which includes chess, Chinese-chess, checkers, draughts, and Shogi. The program takes as input the rules of a specific game and analyses those rules to construct for that game an efficient representation and an evaluation function, both for use with a generic search engine. The strategic analysis performed by the program 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 METAGAMER 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 the program actually plays each game it is given. This appears to be the first program to have derived useful piece values directly from analysis of the rules of different games.