Description

The game was 'designed' by an AI system developed by researchers from the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark. The game was created for the NewScientist.com website.

The game begins with the dealer giving nine cards and 99 tokens to each player. The remainder of the deck is placed in the middle of the table.

Each player then makes a mandatory bet of one or more tokens.

Each player then takes one card from the deck and shows it to the other players.

Each player can then take further cards from the deck, if they want, without showing the other players. But for every card taken, the player must discard three cards from their current hand.

Players can repeat the preceding until they have fewer than three cards left.

Once all players are happy with their hand, they reveal their cards. Ace, Jack, King, and Queen are valued as 10. The player with the highest combination wins the round and takes all tokens on the table.

Additional note:
"The player might notice a certain similarity to blackjack," say Font and Mahlmann. Indeed, the rules to blackjack were part of the initial gene pool that seeded the evolutionary run that produced the game. "We believe that the game contains genetic material from blackjack. But we can't be sure. We didn't create the game, after all – our software did."