Google's DeepMind Plays "Diplomacy" Board Game
takyon writes:
Now that DeepMind has taught AI to master the game of Go-and furthered its advantage in chess-they've turned their attention to another board game: Diplomacy. Unlike Go, it is seven-player, it requires a combination of competition and cooperation, and on each turn players make moves simultaneously, so they must reason about what others are reasoning about them, and so on.
"It's a qualitatively different problem from something like Go or chess," says Andrea Tacchetti, a computer scientist at DeepMind. In December, Tacchetti and collaborators presented a paper at the NeurIPS conference on their system, which advances the state of the art, and may point the way toward AI systems with real-world diplomatic skills-in negotiating with strategic or commercial partners or simply scheduling your next team meeting.
Diplomacy is a strategy game played on a map of Europe divided into 75 provinces. Players build and mobilize military units to occupy provinces until someone controls a majority of supply centers. Each turn, players write down their moves, which are then executed simultaneously. They can attack or defend against opposing players' units, or support opposing players' attacks and defenses, building alliances. In the full version, players can negotiate. DeepMind tackled the simpler No-Press Diplomacy, devoid of explicit communication.
The only winning move is to kill all humans.
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