Following in the same vein as "Claude Plays Pokemon", I did a number of experiments with popular models to play board games. My goal was to make them as autonomous as possible. In this talk, I walk through the highlights of these different experiments. In some play-throughs, I tried to be as helpful to the AI as possible. In others, I did whatever the AI said without comment. And in others, I tried to actively deceive it. Which models did well, and which flopped? What level of autonomy was achieved? What does this reveal about the reasoning models? All this is answered during this talk. At the end, we'll take a poll of the participants to pick from among a few online board games. We'll then gather prompts from the audience to get as far into the game with an AI as time permits.

Outline

0. Intro
1. overview of gaming with models: 2024-2026
2. phase 1: describe and prompt
play on behalf of the model
3. phase 2: screenshot to victory
submit screenshots to the model and let it interpret
4. phase 3: I can see with MCP
let's give the model eyes and let it take its turn autonomously
5. phase 4: audience participation
we'll pick from amongst a few online games (boardgamearena.com) and see how the model does
6. learnings, takeaways and q&a