Operationalizing Intentionality to Play Hanabi With Human Players

The cooperative card game
Hanabi
has become of increasing interest in the community, since it combines partially hidden information with information exchange using restricted communication channels. In this article, we describe artificial intelligence agents that are designed to play the game with human players. Our agents make use of the fact that human players expect other players to act intentionally by formulating goals of their own and planning how to achieve them. They then use the available actions available to communicate their plan to the human player. On the flip side, our agents also interpret the actions performed by the human player as containing information about their plans. We present two different variants of our agent that perform this interpretation in different ways. Additionally, since part of human communication happens in subtle indirect ways, we also demonstrate that our agent can use the timing of the human player’s actions as additional information. In order to validate our agents, we have performed two separate experiments: one was done to validate the intentional component of the agents, while the other focused on the interpretation of received information. In this article, we also present the results obtained from these two experiments.