Simulations of Hanabi strategies

Hanabi is a cooperative card game of incomplete information. Despite relatively simple rules, the space of Hanabi strategies is quite interesting. This project provides a framework for implementing Hanabi strategies in Rust. It also explores some implementations, based on ideas from this paper. In particular, it contains an improved version of their "information strategy", which achieves the best results I'm aware of for games with more than 2 players (see below).

Please feel free to contact me about Hanabi strategies, or this framework.

Most similar projects I am aware of:

• https://github.com/rjtobin/HanSim (written for the paper mentioned above)
• https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Hanabi

Setup

Install rust (rustc and cargo), and clone this git repo.

Then, in the repo root, run cargo run -- -h to see usage details.

For example, to simulate a 5 player game using the cheating strategy, for seeds 0-99:

cargo run -- -n 100 -s 0 -p 5 -g cheat

Or, if the simulation is slow, build with --release and use more threads:

time cargo run --release -- -n 10000 -o 1000 -s 0 -t 4 -p 5 -g info

Or, to see a transcript of the game with seed 222:

cargo run -- -s 222 -p 5 -g info -l debug | less

Strategies

To write a strategy, you simply implement a few traits.

The framework is designed to take advantage of Rust's ownership system so that you can't cheat, without using stuff like Cell or Arc or Mutex.

Generally, your strategy will be passed something of type &BorrowedGameView. This game view contains many useful helper functions (see here). If you want to mutate a view, you'll want to do something like let mut self.view = OwnedGameView::clone_from(borrowed_view);. An OwnedGameView will have the same API as a borrowed one.

Some examples:

• Basic dummy examples
• A cheating strategy, using Rc<RefCell<_>>
• The information strategy!

Results

On seeds 0-9999, we have these average scores and win rates:

	2p	3p	4p	5p
cheat	24.8600	24.9781	24.9715	24.9570
	90.52 %	98.12 %	97.74 %	96.57 %
info	22.3360	24.7279	24.8889	24.8991
	09.98 %	80.48 %	91.37 %	92.10 %

To reproduce:

n=10000   # number of rounds to simulate
t=4       # number of threads
for strategy in info cheat; do
  for p in $(seq 2 5); do
    time cargo run --release -- -n $n -s 0 -t $t -p $p -g $strategy;
  done
done