from Hacker News

Yahtzeeql – Yahtzee solver that's mostly SQL

by skadamat on 5/15/25, 1:51 PM with 9 comments

• by canvascritic on 5/18/25, 10:35 PM

  This is a clever hack and a cute abuse of SQL joins to brute-force what’s essentially a 2-ply MDP over a finite space.

  The core idea btw of using precomputed transition/score tables to simulate and optimize turn-by-turn play is a classical reinforcement learning method

  What would be interesting here is to flip it: train a policy network (maybe tiny, 2-layer MLP) to approximate the SQL policy. then you could distill the SQL brute-force policy into something fast and differentiable.

  i’d love to see a variant where the optimizer isn’t just maximizing EV, but is tuned to human psychology. e.g., people like getting Yahtzees more than getting 23 in chance. could add a utility function over scores.

  Anyway this is a great repo for students to learn expected value optimization with simple mechanics.

• by BarryGuff on 5/18/25, 9:12 PM

  Yahtzee is 100% random luck from dice rolls. You can't "solve" it.