A PROGRAM FOR PLAYING TAROK

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Luštrek, Mitja¹ | Gams, Matjaž¹ | Bratko, Ivan¹

Affiliations: Ljubljana, Slovenia

Note: [1] Department of Intelligent Systems, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. E-mail: mitja.lustrek@ijs.si.

Abstract: A program for playing the three-player tarok card game is presented and the complexity of the game is analyzed. To deal with the unknown distributions of other players’ cards, the program uses a sampling method that accomplishes hierarchical clustering to select representative sets of cards from a host of randomly generated sets. A game tree is searched with the alpha-beta algorithm using several common enhancements and an equivalence transposition table, which groups the positions by strategic similarity instead of storing single positions.

DOI: 10.3233/ICG-2003-26305

Journal: ICGA Journal, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 190-197, 2003