Artificial intelligence is smart, but does it play well with others?

When it comes to games such as chess or Go, artificial intelligence (AI) programs have far surpassed the best players in the world. These "superhuman" AIs are unmatched competitors, but perhaps harder than competing against humans is collaborating with them. Can the same technology get along with people? In a new study, MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers sought to find out how well humans could play the cooperative card game Hanabi with an advanced AI model trained to excel at playing with teammates it had never met before. In single-blind experiments, participants played two series of the game: One with the AI agent as their teammate, and the other with a rule-based agent, a bot manually programmed to play in a predefined way.