Hanabi is a cooperative card game with hidden information that has won important awards in the industry and received some recent academic attention. A two-track competition of agents for the game will take place in the 2018 CIG conference. In this paper, we develop a genetic algorithm that builds rule-based agents by determining the best sequence of rules from a fixed rule set to use as strategy. In three separate experiments, we remove human assumptions regarding the ordering of rules, add new, more expressive rules to the rule set and independently evolve agents specialized at specific game sizes. As result, we achieve scores superior to previously published research for the mirror and mixed evaluation of agents.
Cooperative games with partial observability are a challenging domain for AI research, especially when the AI should cooperate with a human player. In this paper we investigate one such game, the award-winning card game Hanabi, which has been studied by other researchers before. We present an agent designed to play better with a human cooperator than these previous results by basing it on communication theory and psychology research. To demonstrate that our agent performs better with a human cooperator we ran an experiment in which 224 participants played one or more games of Hanabi with different AIs, and will show that our AI scores higher than previously published work in such a setting.