Improving state evaluation, inference, and search in trick-based card games
Michael Buro, Jeffrey R Long, Timothy Furtak, Nathan Sturtevant · 2009
Skat is Germany’s national card game played by millions of players around the world. In this paper, we present the world’s first computer skat player that plays at the level of human experts. This per-formance is achieved by improving state evalua-tions using game data produced by human players and by using these state evaluations to perform in-ference on the unobserved hands of opposing play-ers. Our results demonstrate the gains from adding inference to an imperfect information game player and show that training on data from average human players can result in expert-level playing strength. 1