ICONIP 2009 Intelligent Liar Competition:

Liar Dice (Individual Hand)

Organizer: John SUM, ITIM, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan.

Introduction

Liar dice games are popular bar (drinking) games that can be dated back to many centuries ago [5]. The challenge of Liar Dice games is that a player can bluff (lie). Variants forms of Liar Dice have evolved. In this competition, we base on one simplest form called Individual Hand. Moreover, we limit the number of players to 2 (i.e. a two-person game). The primary objective of this competition is to seek for any computational intelligence technique that can be applied to beat human players, or any technique that can make a computer being a professional Liar.

Important Dates

Expression of interest: July 28, 2009.

Paper submission: July 28, 2009.

Acceptance Notification: August 15, 2009.

Conference Registration: October 1, 2009.

Full Paper/Early bird registration: September 6, 2009.

Submission of Software: November 1, 2009.

Competition/Special Session: December 1-5, 2009.

Individual Hand

In this simple form, a cup and five dices are provided for the players. In the starting of the game, one player (say John) rolls the dices (without letting the other player know what the actual numbers rolled) and then makes a call similar to So-Hand in Poker Game. Suppose John makes a call 2 pairs 4 and 5. The other player (say Mary) needs to decide either (i) trusts the call and then call up or (ii) makes a Liar announcement and then checks if the call is a bluff. Mary wins if she has made a Liar announcement and the cup does not consist of 4455x (here x is any other number). Otherwise, John wins if the cup consists of 4455x.

Now, we assume that Mary trusts the call. She opens the cup and finds that the actual pattern is 34552. It is not possible for her to call up based on these numbers. What Mary can do is to re-roll (once) some of those dices and see if she can get better pattern. As she can re-roll once, she needs to determine carefully which dice(s) should be taken out for re-roll, in order to let her make a call beating 4455x. For 34552, one possibility is to re-roll dices 2, 3 and 4 and leave 55 fixed. In such case, there is more than 0.5 in probability to get one more 5 and make a call 555xx.

After Mary has made a call, it comes to John to make decision. The game terminates once a player has lost.

For the rule of game specifying for this compeititon, please refer to this document.

Available Software

One can also download from FastEddie [2] a program with beautiful graphical interface design or a prototype developed by Jan Chan [1] based on Visual Basic language to experience the funny part of this game.

Tournament

Tentatively, the Intelligent Liar Competition is conducted in a single-elimination Fashion. But the actual tournament setting might change depending on the number of submissions.

Submission

Each contestant (or contestant team) has to send expression of interest (together with an abstract describing the algorithm and the software developed if any) to John Sum (pfsum@nchu.edu.tw) no later than July 28, 2009.

In accordance with the algorithm proposed, organizer will short-list some (or all) of them for the final competition to be held in ICONIP.

Notification of short-list will be announced at August 15, 2009. Each contestant has to formally register for the participation of the conference on or before October 1, 2009 (for early-bird September 6, 2009).

Each contestant could also submit a full paper (LNCS format camera ready) to the ICONIP paper submission system no later than July 28 for regular review and possible inclusion in the ICONIP conference proceeding.

Software, together with source code and executable ¯le, has to be submitted on or before November 1, 2009, to John Sum. Those programs will be uploaded to a public domain for download. A homepage will be ready for this collection of Liar Dice (Individual Hand) programs.

References

[1] http://web.nchu.edu.tw/~pfsum/LiarDice/DiceGame.exe.

[2] http://fasteddiessoftware.com/videogames.aspx.

[3] G.H. Freeman, The tactics of liar dice, Applied Statistics, Vol.38 (3), 507- 516, 1989.

[4] J. Sum and J. Chan, On a liar dice game: Bluff, Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics 2003, pp.2179-2184, Xi'an China, 2003.

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar's_dice.