wrote Hanabi AI post

Author: JStech

_posts/2015-02-16-hanabi-ai.md

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+---
+layout: layout
+title: Hanabi AI
+---
+
+[Hanabi][ha] is a card game that my friends and I have recently gotten into.
+It's cooperative and you hold your cards face out, so you can see everyone
+else's cards but your own. As a team, you're trying to communicate the best
+plays to each other, although the game limits how much you can say.
+
+I've come up with a Hanabi strategy for the five player game that is somewhat
+complicated, but I suspect is capable of winning nearly all of the time. It's
+complicated enough that I won't try to explain it here (I'm not even going to
+explain the game). It's also deterministic, and not computationally
+difficult---it's at least conceivable that humans could play it, although it'd
+take practice to learn.
+
+So of course I decided it'd just be easier to program the computer to play it.
+Now I'm one long weekend and 500 lines deep, and I haven't managed to win a game
+yet. I've learned a lot in the process---I previously hadn't done any object
+oriented programming in Go, and now I feel like a master of interfaces.
+
+I've also come to appreciate just how smart humans are. One aspect of my
+strategy involves expecting another player to take a particular action, and then
+adjusting one's own plan if they don't. That sentence took 23 words, and 138
+characters. It could be a tweet. I haven't even started to figure out how I
+should implement it. (Actually, now that I write this, I think I know what to
+do.)
+
+Anyway, if you want to know more, my code is [on Github][gh].
+
+[ha]: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CYQ9Q76?tag=stechschulten-20
+[gh]: https://github.com/JStech/hanabi-ai