First Skat Playing Olympiad

Call for Participation

Many board games like Checkers or Nine-Men-Morris have been solved already, and even in game such as Chess or Go computers clearly outperform humans. After some variants of Poker have also been solved to a satisfying degree, Skat has been identified as one of the current game-playing challenges, given that good human card players are expected to play consistently better than machines. Skat is a fascinating card game, show-casing many of the intrinsic challenges for modern AI systems such as cooperative and adversarial behaviors (among the players), randomness (in the deal), and partial knowledge (due to hidden cards).

In the context of the 44th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, September 27 – Oct 1, 2021 we decided to run a show-case competition, with 10 series of 36 games to be played on a server over a period of four conference days against a recently developed Skat engine. The intelligent systems (agent players) run as independent executables on a server (similar to the one found via https://32karten.de), and the players have to log into this server. The games will be accessible to the people interested in. There are prices, such as the book "Skatfuchs" for top-scoring humans.

We will use the extended Seeger-System together with a recently proposed ELO system to determine the winner of the tournament.

If you are interested to play, please contact

• Rainer Gößl (rgossel@aol.com)
• Stefan Edelkamp (stefan.edelkamp@gmail.com)

An account will be created for you on an independent test server.