Hearts / xinxin

xinxin is a free Hearts program for OS X

	Download version 0.96 of xinxin. (3.4MB) Requires OS X 10.4 or above. If there is extensive interest, we will look at porting back to 10.3.9.

Version History

0.96 - First public release. This release is feature-complete, but we are looking for feedback on any issues with this program from a wider audience before making a 1.0 release.

xinxin is a program to play Hearts, a popular 4-player card game (rules for play here). Computer programs that play Hearts are still relatively weak; they cannot compete with the best human players. In collaboration with the University of Alberta, we are making this program available for free. It uses some of the latest techniques in AI research, and is improving on a regular basis.

There are two primary purposes for making this program available here:

To be able to benchmark changes to the program against human play.
To collect statistics about human play.

The analysis of this data will be used to suggest ways that the computer play can improve, particularly in relation to opponent modeling. It will also answer questions such as "How predictable are human players?" and "How much variation is there in human styles of play?"

When you run xinxin for the first time, it will request that you enable the transmission of your game data to our server. If you agree to this request, it will also check our servers for updates to the program and notify you when they are available. No personal information is sent to our servers, so you cannot be identified through the data transmitted. The data collected will not be sold or made publically available, but statistical summaries of the data will be posted.

More information on the techniques used in the program can be found at the University of Alberta.

FAQ

Why the name "xinxin"?
There are a lot of different Hearts programs available, so we wanted a name that would be more interesting than just some variation on "Hearts". xinxin (pronounced "sheen-sheen") is taken from the Chinese, and can have two meanings. The first, 新心, could be translated "new heart" and refers to the fact that this is a new Hearts program. It also uses a different type of AI than most programs, meaning the "heart" of how the computer plays is new. The second meaning, 信心, means "faith", and refers to the hope that this program will one day be able to compete with the best human players.
The AI isn't that smart, the computer did something stupid!
The AI will make a number of mistakes on the easier levels of play, and even on the hardest level. But, we are aware of the cause of most of these mistakes and will be improving the quality of play over the coming months and years.
Do the computers cheat?
Each computer player in the game acts completely independently and does not know the cards of the other players. They also do not know that they are playing against a human, and so will make no particular effort to help or hurt a player because they are computer- or human-controlled.