Motivation
Project THETA is what started this whole website. We are addicted to Tarneeb, we think it's a pretty ingenious tick game, and we always looked forward to our next chill session to play some cards. But sometimes an odd number of people would show up - bummer. Actually, it was pretty difficult to have a multiple of 4! We ended up having people waiting on the bench, very restless people, they can't sit still, always calling out opponents cards or threatening to put out the hookah if the game went to long… Anyway, the bench was a very bad idea. We needed some sort of machine to even out the teams.
THINKY was born.
THINKY is the name of THETA's predecessor: An Excel based Tarneeb player written in VBA, cool, quiet and very ugly. Imagine an Excel sheet with bunch of black and red squares. We had to input all the cards it received, and tell it every single card that got played, only then will it tell us what card it wanted to play. Terrible. THINKY was also not that smart, it understood numbers very well… but not the true game of Tarneeb. You see, Tarneeb is more than just number crunching, there is your partner sitting across from you, and based on the cards he/she plays, you can get good information about what they are trying to tell you. The more hesitant your partner is, the more confident you opponents are, their mood during the betting stage… all these signals are crucial in true Tarneeb… we had to create a smarter THINKY. An artificially intelligent machine that has perfect memory, never makes mistakes, will always play the card with the highest winning probability and pays attention to all the Tarneeb signals.
THETA was born… More…