Passcode: A cooperative word guessing game between a human and AI agent

We will show a demo of Passcode, a two person game we have created, in which one person has a target word in mind and gives one-word hints to get their partner to guess the target word. The person who gives hints is referred to as the ‘giver’, and the person who guesses is referred to as the ‘guesser’. The game starts with the giver giving a hint like ‘toast’ and the players alternating, i.e. after each hint the guesser must make a guess, in this case it might be ‘bread’. If the guess is correct, the game is over and the players won. We have also designed and built WordBot, an AI Agent that can play the game with a human partner as either the Guesser or the Giver. WordBot's architecture includes a neural network trained on word associations, current game state, and a knowledge base consisting of ConceptNet. The game is implemented as a web application, accessible through a desktop or mobile device connected to the Internet. Using this, we have tested the game with 113 MTurk users to validate the viability of the agents in successful gameplay with humans. The web-based architecture allows us to massively scale up the number of human players, collect word associations through gameplay data, and build better agents in the future. At NeurIPS, players will have the chance to play against our WordBot, see how many games they can win through the collaborative play with it, and see how they fare against other NeurIPS attendees!