General Game Playing With State-Independent Communication

Communication actions in games are usually given meaning by either the effect they have on the game state or a possible reduction in the size of the information set of an agent. However, this precludes analysis of games involving state-independent communication, in which players are given the ability to communicate with each other but are not required to be truthful. As such, these communication actions cannot be used to reduce the size of the information set or update beliefs in states without considering the intent of the communicating agent. In this paper, we introduce a language to describe the rules of such games as an extension of the Game Description Language (GDL). We also identify a set of scenarios involving state-independent communication actions in which an effective agent should be able to derive information, and propose and evaluate strategies for reasoning about such actions in these scenarios.