Efficiency of GDL Reasoners

The variety of open-source game description language (GDL) reasoners available to newcomers to general game playing (GGP) lowers the technical barrier of entering the field. This variety, however, also makes it more complicated to decide on a fitting reasoner for a given GGP project, considering the project´s objectives, ambitions, and technical constraints. This paper gives an overview of available GDL reasoners, discusses their main pros and cons, and, most importantly, quantifies their relative reasoning performance on a number of games (in terms of nodes searched per second), showing two orders of magnitude difference in some cases. We similarly quantify the performance difference between game playing systems specifically designed for playing a single game on the one hand, and GGP systems on the other hand, witnessing up to several orders of magnitude difference.