
Ask HN: How to construct a simple game for humans but difficult for AI? - MichaelRazum
Assume you want to create a simple game where players can play against each other online for money. BUT they shouldn&#x27;t loose against bots. Is this possible and what would be the easiest way to do so?<p>PS:
Of course you could think of poker, but that is nearly solved by fb https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;pluribus-first-ai-to-beat-pros-in-6-player-poker&#x2F;
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captn3m0
I've been working on finding boardgame-research and this is based mostly on
research I've been skimming through (and not finding).

1\. Hidden State. Not necessarily by itself, but the less the player knows
about what the state transitions look like, the harder it is.

2\. Visual interactions. Dixit is a really cool game with a known deck of
cards, but I haven't seen any bots tackle it yet. The game involves giving a
phrase about a specific card which isn't too specific.

3\. Game Complexity. Easy to explode by having card effects, such as in MTG,
which becomes Turing complete. If you have cards that change the game state
too much, the game state becomes too chaotic to easily account for.

4\. Social interactions. Some research exists on Mafia, but most of it is
rudimentary and doesn't take into account the hundreds of different characters
and emergent character behavior.

5\. Games which force you to model your opponenet's strategy. For eg, some
games have a mechanic where if you play the same card as your opponent, the
action cancels out (actions are picked and revealed simultaneously). Unless
you can build a model of your opponent, it becomes hard to win.

6\. Random start states (and implement something like the Pie rule to ensure
fairness)

Try to stay away from games which have a small state space (Blackjack), or
have easy state-transitions, or are perfect information.

[0]: [https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-
research](https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research)

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lumpy28
Backgammon is a very interesting money game. A professional player I used to
play with told me that it's 70% luck and 30% strategy.

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ColinWright
An interesting article about backgammon:

[https://www.bkgm.com/articles/Berliner/ComputerBackgammon/in...](https://www.bkgm.com/articles/Berliner/ComputerBackgammon/index.html)

Submitted separately:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23882325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23882325)

