Is F# a good language for card game AI?
- by Anthony Brien
I'm writing a Mahjong Game in C# (the Chinese traditional game, not the solitaire kind). While writing the code for the bot player's AI, I'm wondering if a functional language like F# would be a more suitable language than what I currently use which is C# with a lot of Linq. I don't know much about F# which is why I ask here.
To illustrate what I try to solve, here's a quick summary of Mahjong:
Mahjong plays a bit like Gin Rummy. You have 13 tiles in your hand, and each turn, you draw a tile and discard another one, trying to improve your hand towards a winning Mahjong hand, which consists or 4 sets and a pair. Sets can be a 3 of a kind (pungs), 4 of a kind (kongs) or a sequence of 3 consecutive tiles (chows). You can also steal another player's discard, if it can complete one of your sets.
The code I had to write to detect if the bot can declare 3 consecutive tiles set (chow) is pretty tedious. I have to find all the unique tiles in the hand, and then start checking if there's a sequence of 3 tiles that contain that one in the hand. Detecting if the bot can go Mahjong is even more complicated since it's a combination of detecting if there's 4 sets and a pair in his hand. And that's just a standard Mahjong hand. There's also numerous "special" hands that break those rules but are still a Mahjong hand. For example, "13 unique wonders" consists of 13 specific tiles, "Jade Empire" consists of only tiles colored green, etc.
In a perfect world, I'd love to be able to just state the 'rules' of Mahjong, and have the language be able to match a set of 13 tiles against those rules to retrieve which rules it fulfills, for example, checking if it's a Mahjong hand or if it includes a 4 of a kind. Is this something F#'s pattern matching feature can help solve?
