Meta Researchers Create AI That Masters Diplomacy, Tricking Human Players
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, Meta AI announced the development of Cicero, which it clams is the first AI to achieve human-level performance in the strategic board game Diplomacy. It's a notable achievement because the game requires deep interpersonal negotiation skills, which implies that Cicero has obtained a certain mastery of language necessary to win the game. [...] Cicero learned its skills by playing an online version of Diplomacy on webDiplomacy.net. Over time, it became a master at the game, reportedly achieving "more than double the average score" of human players and ranking in the top 10 percent of people who played more than one game. To create Cicero, Meta pulled together AI models for strategic reasoning (similar to AlphaGo) and natural language processing (similar to GPT-3) and rolled them into one agent. During each game, Cicero looks at the state of the game board and the conversation history and predicts how other players will act. It crafts a plan that it executes through a language model that can generate human-like dialog, allowing it to coordinate with other players. Meta calls Cicero's natural language skills a "controllable dialog model," which is where the heart of Cicero's personality lies. Like GPT-3, Cicero pulls from a large corpus of Internet text scraped from the web. "To build a controllable dialogue model, we started with a 2.7 billion parameter BART-like language model pre-trained on text from the internet and fine tuned on over 40,000 human games on webDiplomacy.net," writes Meta. The resulting model mastered the intricacies of a complex game. "Cicero can deduce, for example, that later in the game it will need the support of one particular player," says Meta, "and then craft a strategy to win that person's favor -- and even recognize the risks and opportunities that that player sees from their particular point of view." The research appeared in the journal Science. Meta provided a detailed site to explain how Cicero works and has also open-sourced Cicero's code on GitHub.
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