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Creative Foraging Game

Research software for a cognitive-science task, from lab platform to AI agent.

A Creative Foraging figure made of ten blocks next to the title Creative Foraging

The problem

In the Creative Foraging Game (Hart et al., PLOS ONE 2017) players move ten connected blocks on a grid and save the shapes they like. The lab needed versions of the task for new experiments: with motion tracking, with an AI player, and with two players at once.

What I built

  • A real-time behavioral research platform with Flask, MongoDB and MediaPipe.
  • An AI-agent version: the server checks the board (exactly ten blocks, all connected), lists every legal move, asks Gemini to make a move and guess the shape, then re-checks the board Gemini returns. It was the demo for our HAI 2025 paper.
  • A two-player online version that records both webcams and keeps every move in sync with the video using NTP-style clock samples (private code).
  • A browser-only build with no back end: MediaPipe hand tracking and wrist-color detection guess which of two players made each move, and every session is saved as JSON and CSV to a folder the researcher picks. It has 82 Vitest tests in CI and installs as a PWA.

Results

  • Co-author of "Creative Foraging Game with AI: How Humans and AI Explore and Exploit Together", HAI '25.
  • The browser-only build runs in desktop Chrome or Edge with nothing to install.