Week 10: Conclusions

To conclude my project, I will reflect back on my past progress and see what I could’ve improved on.

Overall, the Cambio part of the project went very smoothly. I did simple probabilities and card counting that would help decision making, and concluded the project with an easily understood strategy guide. Although the results of the project weren’t that helpful in terms of actual gameplay, the process was certainly insightful. One thing I could’ve done is better approximate the lowest possible points from an opponent. For example, when rolling a die, the expected minimum value is 3.5. When rolling 2 dice, the expected minimum value drops to 2.527, and with 3 dice, it further drops to 2.04. Right now my model predicts linearly for this decrease, which causes problems when it predicts that an opponent has a hand value lower than -2.

Then, the part of Fish without trolling. This part was briefly touched on in the project, due to the existence of an obvious strategy that dominates others. Plus, this strategy is more or less already prevalent in more experienced players, leaving the outcome of the game to memory and luck. I guess something I could’ve done is not asking my friends for suggestions or existing strategies, and try to come up with them on my own, whether through simple analysis or logical reasoning, to see how intuitive they are and how hard it is to come up with them independently, but it would not change my results.

Finally, the part of Fish with trolling. This part was the hardest, and also took the most time and effort. If I started with the parts of the calculation that were harder to perform, or if I estimated how much work my original plan would’ve required, a lot of the tragedy that happened near the end could have been avoided. Moreover, I could’ve saved a lot more time for in-person data collection as well as testing out my strategies. So far, the only Fish games I’ve played after my project started were to test out Yourui’s bot, but it did not go as expected.

There were also a lot more minor details that could be improved, whether it is submitting blogs on time, being more productive during the meetings with advisors, etc.