This week, our team met in the IPPD lab to play Catan! Given that our project involves training an AI model to Catan, we wanted to take a moment to play the game ourselves and understand its rules better.

Catan is so complex for an AI model because there is a lot of freedom in what moves a player can make. On a person’s turn, one can trade his or her resources with another player, perform a maritime trade (a trade with the bank), build roads, build settlements, upgrade settlements, or buy development cards. Additionally, it’s not obvious which moves are the best. For example, a trade might benefit one’s opponent more than oneself. One has to set goals and take risks to reach victory.

Part of our challenge in this project is figuring out how to tell our AI model if it is performing well or poorly. Winning the game might be an obvious indicator, but without other indicators of success, our model will have a harder time learning. After playing a few turns of Catan, our team went through some brainstorming techniques to try and determine what constitutes a “good move.”

Additionally, our team has been working on our presentation for our sponsor, CAE. Next week, we will be visiting them in Tampa, Florida. That’s all for now!