A bot that finds the best move in any given position of Buckshot Roulette. It does this by minimising the chance that the Dealer can kill the Player.
There are two major parts to the bot, searching and evaluating.
Searching consists of the following steps, finding obvious moves, predicting move evaluation if there are no obvious moves, then do a minimax search.
In order to save time and prune nodes from the tree, in specific circumstances, the bot will only check one move.
| Condition | Obvious Move |
|---|---|
| Is the shell live, does the current player have a hand saw, and is the other player's health equal to 2? | Use the hand saw |
| Is the shell live and the current player does not have a hand saw? | Shoot the other player |
| Is the shell blank? | Shoot self |
| Does the current player have a magnifying glass, and is the current shell unknown? | Use the magnifying glass |
| Is the current player not on maximum health? | Use cigarettes |
| Is there more than 2 shells in the gun, with at least one blank shell? | Use handcuffs |
If there is no obvious move in the position, it will get all moves and predict evaluation based on the following criteria.
Backshot Roulette uses a minimax search with alpha-beta pruning. Essentially, the bot goes through every possible position and picks the move that leads to the best possible evaluation.
For a better explanation, see this video by Sebastian Lague (I rewatched this video a lot when making the bot).