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A.I. LEARNS THE DIPLOMACY GAME
MACHINE-LEARNING ARTIFICIAL intelligence (A.I.) has already beat humans in playing chess, Go, and poker. But what about a board game that involves negotiation and even deception? The classic board game Diplomacy presents such confrontation.
This board game was created by Allan B. Calhamer in 1954; it was released commercially in 1959. Fans of the game included John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, and broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite. Diplomacy, Wikipedia notes, differs from most board wargames “in forming and betraying alliances with other players and forming beneficial strategies.”
And in Science, November 25, 2022, Matthew Hutson writes, “Now, an A.I. algorithm from the company Meta has shown it can beat many humans in the board game Diplomacy.”
Diplomacy, an Art. Matthew Hutson writes, “Diplomacy, many a statesperson has argued, is an art: one that requires not just strategy, but also intuition, persuasion, and even subterfuge—human skills that have long been off-limits to even the most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) approaches.”
Hutson describes, “Meta’s AI agent, CICERO, welds together a strategic reasoning module and a dialogue module. As in other machine learning AIs, the modules were trained on large data sets, in this case 125,261 games that humans had played online—both the game plays and transcripts of player negotiations.”
“To test its skill,” Hutson says, “the researchers had CICERO play 40 online games against humans (who mostly assumed it was a human). It placed in the top 10% of players who’d played at least two games. ‘In a game that involves language and negotiation, that agents can reach human parity is very exciting,’ says Zhou Yu, a computer scientist at Columbia University who studies dialogue systems.”
Hutson also cites Jonathan Gratch, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California who notes two technical innovations. “First, CICERO grounds its communication in multistep planning, and second, it keeps its remarks and game play within the realm of human convention.”
“During training,” Hutson says, “the researchers also rewarded it for humanlike play so that its actions wouldn’t confound other players. In any domain, whether dinner-table manners or driving, conventions tend to ease interactions.”
Hutson continues: “Gratch says the work is ‘impressive’ and ‘important.’ But he questions how much CICERO’s dialogue, as opposed to its strategic planning, contributed to its success. According to the paper, Diplomacy experts rated about 10% of CICERO’s messages as inconsistent with its plan or game state. ‘That suggests it’s saying a lot of crap,’ Gratch says. Yu agrees, noting that CICERO sometimes utters non sequiturs.”
Geez. Now and again, so do I. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2022
Simanaitis Says 
Reblogged this on Calculus of Decay .
A(I)nthropomorphizing a computer by giving it a human being’s name, like CICERO, just won’t cut it except as a highly risible ruse, which smacks of when Western Australia’s former Chief Justice, Wayne Martin made a most ambit application to parliament for him to be granted permission to be able to sit in with jury members in the jury room after they have retired from the courtroom to deliberate on an accused’s guilt or innocence during trial. Surely, but surely, having been a jurist for many years, Martin should have been able to easily adjudge that he had less chance than that of a snowflake’s in ‘hell’ of being granted such privilege. Methinks that, before he retired from the bench, and after he had dispensed with the requirement for anyone to wear the ridiculous horsehair wigs in court, he wanted an extra feather besides seen (s)worn in but his (es)cap(e). S_’hades’ of AIming for the (pe)sky…say what? Give me strength at length. Tsk.
Dennis, I’m mondegreen-ically ‘moved to say’ that at least your admission of “now and again”, iff (sic) at least for the present, can’t be construed as being a ‘non sequitur’, provided of course you take pains assiduously to ensure that the “again” but ever pursues the “now”…if you follow ‘mime_meaning’ (given at times wonky words tend to fail me)?