With the AI running on the client end, with some of those clients being a phone, I'd be surprised if they do a full-on ANN with it; To me, sounds probably something smaller like a decision tree output from a server-based ANN.
I’m also curious about the AI, which is also a hard problem.
I'm also intensely curious about the AI. There's a little about it in the Polygon article linked in the OP, but honestly I hope there's something lost in translation there. The claims they're making about the AI seem almost laughably naive. And even if they're right and it's an amazing Dominion AI that can beat even seasoned players in most games, that sounds pretty bad for casual players! Who wants to play against a computer that beats you 90% of the time? Some people will, sure, but I bet that'll get old fast for a lot of players.
EDIT: But I mean, check this out, from the linked article:
"Instead of having a concept of a card in our neural network, we have a concept of each of the components of a card,” said Duringer. “The card has a cost. The card has a victory point value. The card might give you an extra buy or an extra action. If we can just understand these components, we don’t need to know the ‘value’ of a card. We can surmise it on the spot by understanding those components."
It's simultaneously hilarious and sad. The quote is from the Temple Gates CEO, so I can only hope this information is either misleading or outdated.
I'm curious how much understanding you have of programming ANNs - this is the exact sort of component analysis you'd need to do to make an ANN that "understands" dominion. He's not talking "this card costs $X, it must be better than the card that costs $Y", he's talking summing the available information into a single decision process, and that includes things like opportunity cost, cost, effects, etc. Even unique features - creating sparse dimensions in the ANN training set, but whatever - can be determined to be separable features.
anyhow you can sign up for the beta
here, this was posted in the dominion fb group this morning