Random Forests for Opponent Hand Estimation in Gin Rummy

Abstract

We demonstrate an AI agent for the card game of Gin Rummy. The agent uses simple heuristics in conjunction with a model that predicts the probability of each card's being in the opponent's hand. To estimate the probabilities for cards' being in the opponent's hand, we generate a dataset of Gin Rummy games using self-play, and train a random forest on the game information states. We explore the random forest classifier we trained and study the correspondence between its outputs and intuitively correct outputs. Our agent wins 61% of games against a baseline heuristic agent that does not use opponent hand estimation.