jamesmullenbach.github.io by jamesmullenbach

Over the break between semesters, I've spent a lot of time with family playing a popular board game called Codenames. If you haven't played, the gist is that one player from each team, the'spymaster', tries to get their team members to select their team's assigned words from a group of 25 while avoiding the other team's words and a game-ending'assassin' word, using one word clues. It's like the game show Password, except clues can apply to any number of words. It's a fun language based game and makes for an interesting testbed for simple experiments like the one I'm about to talk about. Naturally, I thought about how a computer might play this game.