Investigation of an Adaptive Cribbage Player

Cribbage is (normally) a two-player card game where the aim is to score 121 points before your opponent. The game has four stages, one of which involves discarding two cards from the six cards you are dealt. A later stage scores the four cards in your hand together with a card cut randomly from the deck after the discards have been made. The two cards that were discarded are used to form another hand, when combined with the two discards from your opponent. This additional hand is referred to as the crib or box and is scored alternatively by you and your opponent. In this work, we investigate how a strategy can be evolved that decides which cards should be discarded into the crib. Several methods are investigated with the best one being compared against a commercially available program.