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Using Game Description Language for mediated dispute resolution

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Abstract

Mediation is a process in which two parties agree to resolve their dispute by negotiating over alternative solutions presented by a mediator. In order to construct such solutions, the mediator brings more information and knowledge, and, if possible, resources to the negotiation table. In order to do so, the mediator faces the challenge of determining which information is relevant to the current problem, given a vast database of knowledge. The contribution of this paper is the automated mediation machinery to resolve this issue. We define the concept of a Mediation Problem and show how it can be described in Game Description Language (GDL). Furthermore, we present an algorithm that allows the mediator to efficiently determine which information is relevant to the problem and collect this information from the negotiating agents. We show with several experiments that this algorithm is much more efficient than the naive solution that simply takes all available knowledge into account.

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Notes

  1. Technically speaking, GDL does allow you to define utility over non-terminal states, but these utility values do not really have any meaning, as in the end the utility of the terminal state is the only thing that ‘counts’.

  2. GDL defines more relations symbols, but we will not discuss them here because they are not relevant for this paper.

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Acknowledgements

This work was sponsored by Endeavour Research Fellowship 4577_2015 awarded by the Australian Department of Education.

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Correspondence to Dave de Jonge.

Appendix A

Appendix A

In this section, we present the results obtained with a number of other games. All results in this section were averaged over 100 repetitions (see Tables 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15).

1.1 Experimental results connect-4

Table 4 Time required to collect the rules from the players, in milliseconds
Table 5 Time required to initialize the AIMA Prover, in milliseconds
Table 6 Time required to initialize the PropNet, in milliseconds

1.2 Experimental results breakthrough

Table 7 Time required to collect the rules from the players, in milliseconds
Table 8 Time required to initialize the AIMA Prover, in milliseconds
Table 9 Time required to initialize the PropNet, in milliseconds

1.3 Experimental results free-for-all

Table 10 Time required to collect the rules from the players, in milliseconds
Table 11 Time required to initialize the AIMA Prover, in milliseconds
Table 12 Time required to initialize the PropNet, in milliseconds

1.4 Experimental results Qyshinsu

Table 13 Time required to collect the rules from the players, in milliseconds
Table 14 Time required to initialize the AIMA Prover, in milliseconds
Table 15 Time required to initialize the PropNet, in milliseconds

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de Jonge, D., Trescak, T., Sierra, C. et al. Using Game Description Language for mediated dispute resolution. AI & Soc 34, 767–784 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0790-8

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