When the pandemic lockdown created some serious obstacles to finding people to play my favorite social deduction card game with, I did what any sensible software engineer would do: I created my own opponents.

In this session we'll explore the various factors that go into designing an artificial intelligence opponent for a game of any type, and explore the potential strategies and concerns in a hidden roles / hidden information social deduction game where bluffing and lying are part of the core game mechanics.

We'll explore building a probabilistic model of the game board in Bezier Games' One Night Ultimate Werewolf, the idea of deduction and deception in an uncertain world, and training techniques to help artificial intelligence find optimal playing strategies and see if AI can innovate new ways of surprising and deceiving their opponents - including humans.