1. J. J. Divin Astrid Glende Jon McClain Lorenzo Moore
Spades Agents
J. J. Divin
Astrid Glende
Jon McClain
Lorenzo Moore
Team Mates: Astrid Glende, Jon McClain, Lorenzo Moore
Goal: Create a program that plays Spades.
AI Spades

2. Project Goals To create an A. I. Agent that plays spades wisely.
Create a knowledge base detailed enough for an agent to make rational decisions.
Agents must work with a team mate to beat opposing team.
Implement A. I. concepts and theories into a real-world scenario.
Agents should not cheat.
Winner should be correctly evaluated.
Wisely …
That means that the program must be able to play as good as / better than a good human player.
Knowledge base: Heuristics, history, rules, card tracking.
Team: Cooperation, no direct communication, no knowledge of team mate’s hand, good guesses using probability function to simulate human intuition, never beat team mate.
Come back to A. I. Concepts later
AI Spades

3. Description
Game has four players, each dealt 13 cards out of a 52-card deck.
Cards are valued from the two to the ace of each suit.
Spades are always the trump suit. Spades beats any other suit, no matter the value of the card.
There are two teams of two players each that alternate turns as they play based on the winner of the previous trick.
After first player plays, the rest of the players must follow suit. If they do not have any card from the current suit, they may play a card of any other suit.
Astrid
AI Spades

4. Description
After every round the trick that was played is evaluated to determine who won.
A spade will beat any card from any suit except a higher spade.
A card that does not follow suit and is not a spade always loses.
The team who plays the highest card wins the trick.
The team with the most tricks when all cards have been played wins the game.
Astrid
AI Spades

5. Standards Standards being adopted.
Regular spades rules.
Standards specifically being ignored.
Bidding system normally used in spades.
Problem Domain too large
Explain bidding system
AI Spades

6. A. I. Techniques
Combination of a knowledge-based agent and state-based agent.
Uses a state of the current hand to determine what options there are and which cards can be played.
Uses a knowledge base of card history and rule-based heuristics to determine the best play choice from the state of the current hand.
Uses top-down search technique to determine the card to be played.
KB: Contains heuristics & play history
State: looks at current state & implements KB to play best choice
Top-down: Draw tree & explain
AI Spades

7. Compile list of heuristics. Program playing agents.
Schedule
Project milestones
Compile list of heuristics.
Program playing agents.
Design Graphical
Interface
Problem Domain too large
Presentation
and Paper
September October November December
AI Spades

8. Current Status Overview of progress: Unexpected problems.
On track in game programming.
Encountered problems in visualization implementation.
Unexpected problems.
Building an entire game from scratch takes a lot of time. Implementing visualization would have required OpenGL or another source, which would have required much more time than we had.
Problem Domain too large
AI Spades

9. Implementation
Problem divided into four parts based on position that the player plays in.
Player 1
Player 2
Player 3
Player 4
Jon & Lorenzo
AI Spades