12 research outputs found
Hanabi is NP-complete, even for cheaters who look at their cards
This paper studies a cooperative card game called Hanabi from an algorithmic combinatorial game theory viewpoint. The aim of the game is to play cards from 1 to n in increasing order (this has to be done independently in c different colors). Cards are drawn from a deck one by one. Drawn cards are either immediately played, discarded or stored for future use (overall each player can store up to h cards). The main feature of the game is that players know the cards their partners hold (but not theirs. This information must be shared through hints).
We introduce a simplified mathematical model of a single-player version of the game, and show several complexity results: the game is intractable in a general setting even if we forego with the hidden information aspect of the game. On the positive side, the game can be solved in linear time for some interesting restricted cases (i.e., for small values of h and c)
The 2018 Hanabi competition
This paper outlines the Hanabi competition, first run at CIG 2018, and returning for COG 2019. Hanabi presents a useful domain for game agents which must function in a cooperative environment. The paper presents the results of the two tracks which formed the 2018 competition and introduces the learning track, a new track for 2019 which allows the agents to collect statistics across multiple games
The Hanabi Challenge: A New Frontier for AI Research
From the early days of computing, games have been important testbeds for
studying how well machines can do sophisticated decision making. In recent
years, machine learning has made dramatic advances with artificial agents
reaching superhuman performance in challenge domains like Go, Atari, and some
variants of poker. As with their predecessors of chess, checkers, and
backgammon, these game domains have driven research by providing sophisticated
yet well-defined challenges for artificial intelligence practitioners. We
continue this tradition by proposing the game of Hanabi as a new challenge
domain with novel problems that arise from its combination of purely
cooperative gameplay with two to five players and imperfect information. In
particular, we argue that Hanabi elevates reasoning about the beliefs and
intentions of other agents to the foreground. We believe developing novel
techniques for such theory of mind reasoning will not only be crucial for
success in Hanabi, but also in broader collaborative efforts, especially those
with human partners. To facilitate future research, we introduce the
open-source Hanabi Learning Environment, propose an experimental framework for
the research community to evaluate algorithmic advances, and assess the
performance of current state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, In Press (Artificial Intelligence
Evaluating and modelling Hanabi-playing agents
Agent modelling involves considering how other agents will behave, in order to influence your own actions. In this paper, we explore the use of agent modelling in the hidden-information, collaborative card game Hanabi. We implement a number of rule-based agents, both from the literature and of our own devising, in addition to an Information Set-Monte Carlo Tree Search (IS-MCTS) agent. We observe poor results from IS-MCTS, so construct a new, predictor version that uses a model of the agents with which it is paired. We observe a significant improvement in game-playing strength from this agent in comparison to IS-MCTS, resulting from its consideration of what the other agents in a game would do. In addition, we create a flawed rule-based agent to highlight the predictor's capabilities with such an agent
Traditional Wisdom and Monte Carlo Tree Search Face-to-Face in the Card Game Scopone
We present the design of a competitive artificial intelligence for Scopone, a
popular Italian card game. We compare rule-based players using the most
established strategies (one for beginners and two for advanced players) against
players using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and Information Set Monte Carlo
Tree Search (ISMCTS) with different reward functions and simulation strategies.
MCTS requires complete information about the game state and thus implements a
cheating player while ISMCTS can deal with incomplete information and thus
implements a fair player. Our results show that, as expected, the cheating MCTS
outperforms all the other strategies; ISMCTS is stronger than all the
rule-based players implementing well-known and most advanced strategies and it
also turns out to be a challenging opponent for human players.Comment: Preprint. Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transaction on Game