Ethan Steinbacher, Alex Hazan
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Ramanujan
Two-player, zero-sum games have long been a subject of interest for the machine reasoning field. Children’s games are especially useful, as their simple rules and deterministic outcomes make them easy to analyze. This project set out to analyze the effectiveness of certain search algorithms in the context of the game Chopsticks. We vary the initial parameters of the game, such as how many hands each player has or how many fingers are on each hand. Specifically, we looked into Minimax with Alpha-Beta Pruning and Monte-Carlo Tree Search to come up with playing strategies.
