* Shut The Box

Games

• We study games because they are

  • Hard: seem to require some intelligence

  • Pre-abstracted: "simple" models, clear rules, "win condition"

• "Game" is a bit ill-defined: certainly includes single-agent and multiple-agent things

• Games range from competitive to cooperative

Shut The Box

• Shut The Box is a simple multi-player probabilistic dice game vaguely related to Yahtzee

• We will use the single-player 9-digit game with "digital" ("say what you see") scoring

• I have built a single-player solver for this game. We will learn how it works. Today is not that day

• (rules, demo)

• I've also built a weaker heuristic AI for this game. That is what we'll talk about today

Shut The Box: Setup

• "Obvious": Represent a state as a set of remaining digits and a dice roll

• Apparently a state is an instance to be solved

• Solution? A "better" state

  • Can be greedy: pick the next state with lowest score

  • Greed is not necessarily good: actual scoring is at the end

  • Now we're balancing two things: lower score / "better" numbers

Shut The Box: Code

• AI code is a lot of setup per unit intelligence

• I've done this setup for you here

• Let's look at the code

Shut The Box: Player

• Just choosing randomly from the legal moves is not AI (or is it)?

• But it's a good place to start

• I then built stronger heuristic rules and evaluated via play

Shut The Box: Evaluating the Player

• Could try to do a full analytic evaluation

• Much easier to play a bunch of games and see how it does

• What is the success measure? Mean? Number of perfect scores? Something else?

• Will the AI vary depending on what success measure is chosen? (yes)