ICCC 2024 Hands-On Codenames Workshop
Come play Codenames against a creative AI agent, or write your own!
Codenames is an award-winning game in which two teams compete to decipher one-word clues given by their respective "spymasters". The spymaster must come up with one-word clues that correspond to as many of their team's word cards as possible while avoiding accidentally indicating the other team's cards—or the game-ending assassin! Successfully playing this game requires many skills including understanding word relationships, evaluating the relative value of clues, and the ability to quickly search a large set of possible clues.
Come to our ICCC workshop to learn about computational approaches to the interesting and challenging task of playing Codenames. In this full-day workshop, participants can get hands-on experience with designing their own AI agent to play Codenames. We will provide a simple client/server codebase and a "starter agent" for participants to experiment with and modify, after which we will play those agents in exhibition games against humans and each other. Additionally, the workshop will involve learning about existing creative AI agents that play Codenames, discussion of how to design such systems, and analysis of the results of the exhibition games.
Please note that while every conference attendee is invited to attend the gameplay and discussions, any participants who wish to build or modify a Codenames agent must bring their own laptop.
After participating in the workshop, please complete this survey about your experience. Thank you!
GitHub repository
Here you can find the code you'll need to connect your own Codenames agent to our lightweight local game server. By building a client using this code, you can play your agent against both humans and other agents.
Note: you don't have to prepare an agent beforehand to attend the workshop, but we'd love to show off your agent if you do!