In 2014, I wrote a minimax-based AI to play games on Pokemon Showdown. We adapted Showdown's battle simulator for our tree search. The hardest part was syncing the local simulator state with the actual game state - the battle state in Pokemon is both complex and partially observed. Bugs in this process could result in the AI using Protect twice because the state wasn't updated with the fact that it used Protect the previous turn.

The minimax AI was able to use tactics like Pain Split, Spikes, and Magic Guard.

Writeup: https://varunramesh.net/content/documents/cs221-final-report... GitHub: https://github.com/rameshvarun/showdownbot