I am new to the world of Dominion, but have quickly fallen in love with the game and the mathmatical possibilities.
Is there an "commonly accepted" algorithm to score a deck of cards, or a games current state? (Say between 0 and 1)
Here is where I am coming from:
Taking the "game tree" approach to analyzing Tic-Tac-Toe you can fully populate the game tree such that every possible turn can be mapped out from the start to every possible finish. Once you know the outcome of the end state you know to stay on a path through the game/decision tree that will lead to a win or a tie. Tic-Tac-Toe is a very easy game and if you know the tree you will never lose.
Taking the game tree approach to analyzing Chess is a very difficult proposition. There is yet to be a computer able to calculate and hold in memory all the potential decisions from the start to the many ends, and there may never be one that can becuase of the immense number of possibilities. You can model the first n number of turns, and can model the more limited set end games but connecting them is impossible. They way AI systems do this is to look at a particular board position and rank it between 0 and 1. 1 being a winning position, 0 being a losing position, 0.5 being a 50% chance of winning. While you may not be sure of a particular decision you are best to go down the path that has the higest %win.
With that as a background, and assuming that it is similarly difficult to map the entire Dominion Game Tree, does anyone know of prior work to rank a particular deck or decks in a game on their %win potential?
If not, what would be a good ranking algorithm? I.e. the more provinces and Gold get a higher score, the gardens/workshop combo gives it a boost, a particular engine strength, negativly coorelated with curses, etc...
