Meta’s Latest AI Can Play Diplomacy Better Than Most Humans

Researchers at Meta have created an AI capable of playing the game of Diplomacy and beating most human players.

As the Meta AI blog explains(Opens in a new window), Diplomacy was viewed as a “near-impossible grand challenge in AI” for decades because of the skill set required to play the game. The goal of Diplomacy(Opens in a new window) is to control the majority of the board, but this is done through players negotiating with each other using conversation, forming alliances, making agreements, and detecting when other players are bluffing.

Meta took on the challenge, creating and training an AI called CICERO(Opens in a new window), which ranks in the top 10% of Diplomacy players who played more than one game (on webDiplomacy.net(Opens in a new window)). This was achieved through combining two different areas of AI research: strategic reasoning and natural language processing.

The AI is formed from a controllable dialogue model and a strategic reasoning engine working together. This allows CICERO to predict the moves other players are likely to make, but also the moves those players think CICERO will make (strategic reasoning). CICERO then uses a set of carefully chosen plans on which to base its conversations with other players so it can “negotiate, offer advice, share information, and make agreements” (natural language processing).

AI capable of beating the best players at games such as chess, poker, and Go are trained using self-play reinforcement learning. As Diplomacy requires cooperation with human players, that method doesn’t work. Typically, supervised learning is used for such games, but Meta says that creates a”relatively weak and highly exploitable” opponent. Instead, Meta used an iterative planning algorithm that “balances dialogue consistency with rationality.”

CICERO is far from perfect and can generate inconsistent dialogue, but it’s good enough to offer a serious challenge to even the best players of the game. However, Meta believes the technology developed from creating this AI can be put to good use elsewhere. For example, allowing voice assistants to hold a long conversation with us and teach us new skills. Then there’s the potential for such AI to be used in videos games to act as realistic characters it’s hard to tell apart from human players.

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