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pimmen89 t1_izbm876 wrote

Were there any local optimums that CICERO got stuck in, especially during development?

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MetaAI_Official OP t1_izfa9bo wrote

I'm not entirely sure if this answers what you were asking, but on the strategic planning side of CICERO, in some sense the fundamental challenge of Diplomacy is that it has a large number of local optima, with no inherent notion of which optimum is better than any other. Because you need to sometimes cooperate with others to do well, the way you need to play depends heavily on the conventions and expectations of other players, and a strategy that is near-optimal in one population of players can be disastrous in another population of players. This is precisely what we observed in earlier work on No-press Diplomacy (Paper). Central to many of our strategic planning techniques in Cicero is the idea of regularization towards human-like behavioral policies, to ensure CICERO's play remains roughly compatible with human play, rather than falling into any of the countless other equilibria that don't. -DW

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MetaAI_Official OP t1_izfam7u wrote

There were also some places where it looked like it was heading down strategic blind alleys but it kept getting strong results - so for me it also showed that humans can also get stuck in local optimums, especially when groups and their collective "meta-strategies" get involved. -AG

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pimmen89 t1_izfia6x wrote

This was a very nice and enlightening answer! Thank you so much! 🙂

Could you give an example of a local optimum that was funny to watch?

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Thorusss t1_izfuj6u wrote

>Central to many of our strategic planning techniques in Cicero is the idea of regularization towards human-like behavioral policies, to ensure CICERO's play remains roughly compatible with human play

That implies there could be more optimal strategies even with alliances with human players? Is there interest in exploring this, and evolving the strategies beyond what humans have found so far, as it has happened with chess and go? See where and Cicero2 could move the Metagame to?

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