We’re back from spring break! This week, Team Tactica began work on preparing for the upcoming Prototype Inspection and Evaluation Day. Previously, IPPD held a Prototype Inspection Day (PID) in mid-November for the Fall semester. Back then, the focus was on sharing our current builds, discussing our overall project plans, and getting feedback for improvement. For this upcoming prototype inspection day, our prototype will be of even greater focus as our project nears completion.

In our demo, we will showcase our user interface, which clearly visualizes the game of Catan and the moves each player makes. We’ve modified the interface to run in multiple ways. One way we can run the game is by having only bots and ML models play against each other. Without any human players, the game will run automatically, allowing users to visualize games being played “faster than real time.” Another way we can run the game is by having a human user play against the bots. This will allow us to show more of the interface and how humans can interact with our trained models.

One challenge we face is presenting our demo to audience members who’ve never played Catan. While it is a fairly well-known game, Catan isn’t as ubiquitous as Chess or Go. As such, we’ll have to focus on the aspects of Catan that most interact with the RL facet for our project: playing against multiple players and making mutually beneficial trades.

Prototype Inspection and Evaluation Day is next Tuesday. We’ll be sure to share all the details in the next blog post. That’s all for now – see you next week!