This week, our team has been busy preparing for Prototype Inspection Day (PID). Next Tuesday, we and the other IPPD teams will present our prototypes to several judges to receive feedback on our project. In our case, we will present the simulation we have, hopefully with added visuals to show how the AI model is performing.

We’ve mentioned that we have a simulation and AI model, but we can now show more details about the inner workings of our project.

To keep things clean, we try to keep the AI model and simulation as separate as possible. The simulation’s job is to keep track of the game state and relay state information to the AI agents. State information is all the information about the game’s current “state”, i.e., the cities, settlements, where they’re built, who owns them, what cards each player has, who has the most victory points, etc. The main issues with the current simulation are that it is not well encapsulated from the AI model and its functions are difficult to understand. The programming team’s goal is to address these issues.

The AI agents process this state information into data and feed it into a reinforcement learning algorithm. This should hopefully result in an action that will be sent back to the simulation, allowing the player to “make their move.” The main issue with the current AI model is that the reward function needs to be improved. The reward function determines which moves are good and which moves are bad (something that isn’t very obvious in Catan). The AI team’s goal is to address this issue by coming up with different reward functions and evaluating each of them. Hopefully, this gives a better understanding of our project!

As we work toward our prototype, we also have to be ready for our System-Level Design Review (SLDR). The SLDR is like our PDR, but it aims to be as specific as possible in describing our project design. It also must demonstrate that the project design will meet the specifications set in our PDR.

That’s all for now! See you next week!