"Birds of a Feather" Solitaire Card Game

Birds of a Feather

Designed August 9, 2016 by Todd Neller
First presented in AI Matters "AI Education Matters" Column: Vol. 2, Issue 4, Summer 2016: Birds of a Feather (wiki page)
A good 4-color deck for playing Birds of a Feather
Birds of a Feather PDF Handout

Introduction

Materials: a standard, shuffled 52-card deck

Setup: Deal cards singly, face-up into a grid (e.g. 4-by-4).

Object: Form a single stack of all cards. (For more a more general objective, see Birds of a Feather.)

Play: A player may move one stack of cards onto another stack of cards in the same row or column if the cards on top of the stacks have either

Aces are low and not adjacent to kings, so rank adjacency is according the ordering A, 2, 3, …, J, Q, K.

Example 4-by-4 grid deal:

Example solution: JS-JC TS-9H JS-5S KS-3S KS-KC JS-KS JS-TS 6H-7D 6H-5C 6H-8H QH-AH QH-TH QH-3H QH-JS QH-6H

Additional Resources

Eclipse Java project for playing and solving Birds of a Feather puzzles. This is not highly optimized. Rather, it is intended as a starting point for exploration.
EAAI Birds of a Feather Research Challenge for faculty-mentored undergraduates (PDF)
- Video Introduction (mp4, 40:39)
  - Video PowerPoint slides (pdf, ppt)
  - Brief summary (mp4, 5:12)
- Base Code - Here is competition base code in the form of an Eclipse Java project that includes a GUI for play, a model of the game state, and a rudimentary solver (easily improvable). This is intended as a starting point; feel free to port to other languages, extend, modify, etc. as your curiosity leads you!
- Research challenge teams should have at least one undergraduate student and at least one faculty mentor. Interested teams should contact Todd Neller.
- Code for generating Birds of a Feather solvability classification data and video overview (38:51)
  - Resources for learning more about machine learning and related column.
  - Weka website
  - ISLR and RStudio websites
- Draft Python port of base code
- Important Dates:
  - September 5, 2018: Author electronic assignment submission deadline
  - November 1, 2018: Author notification
  - November 14, 2018: Final revisions due
  - January 28-29, 2019: Symposium
- Congratulations to the research challenge teams! These are the 7 published papers and 1 poster presented at EAAI-19 (from https://aaai.org/Library/AAAI/aaai19contents.php):

Papers:

Determining Solvability in the Birds of a Feather Card Game
Shuto Araki, Juan Pablo Arenas Uribe, Zach Wilkerson, Steven Bogaerts, Chad Byers
Pages 9627-9634 | PDF

Efficient Solving of Birds of a Feather Puzzles
Todd W. Neller, Connor Berson, Jivan Kharel, Ryan Smolik
Pages 9686-9692 | PDF