2026-08-27 · paper-digest
Collins et al.: People judge a brand-new game with one move of lookahead and six imagined playouts — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed Nature paper by Katherine M. Collins and colleagues (MIT and others). More than 1,000 people were shown 121 novel games from the tic-tac-toe family and asked, before playing, whether each looked fair and fun. The Intuitive Gamer model - one move of lookahead spent inside six simulated playouts - explained the fairness judgements at R2 = 0.81 against a human ceiling of 0.82, beating the deep-searching Expert Gamer (0.65) and MCTS (0.60).
