What is Mental Poker?

This project started as a hackathon project for modeling a game where players need to maintain private state over a public channel (Fluid Framework). More details here.

Implementing this type of games in a zero-trust environment is known as Mental Poker (original paper is here).

Games in a zero-trust environment

We use a broad definition of game. A game can be a card game, but it can also be a lottery, an auction, a blind vote etc. A game is any activity involving multiple people (players) where some information might have to be kept private and players compete for some payoff.

By zero-trust environment we mean an environment without a trusted 3rd party. For example, if we have a trusted 3rd party, like a service brokering the game, we can trust the service to shuffle a deck of cards and hand them to each player. Without a trusted 3rd party, we need to shuffle the deck as described in the Mental Poker paper linked above. We also can’t trust other players, as players compete for a payoff so we need to eliminate cheating through cryptography. We achieve all of this by communicated over a public channel where all players view all shared state.

See Zero trust for limitations.

More resources

See these articles for more details on Mental Poker (covering some of the implementations in this project).

A short talk on Mental Poker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1gPTXAllxY.