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CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

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Re: CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

#11

Post by sdenton4 »

erehweb wrote: post #4

"In a game in which dishonesty is commonplace, it is notable that we were able to achieve human-level performance by controlling the agent's dialogue through the strategic reasoning module to be largely honest and helpful to its speaking partners."

This is one of the key insights in playing Diplomacy well. You can turn honest opposition in the early game into trust, which is helpful for flipping allegiances in the late game. ('Yes, I've been trying to murder you the entire game, but I've been honest about it, and never lied to you once. Now I see that we've got a real opportunity to dislodge Russia and sweep the eastern half of the board if we work together... What do you say?') Dishonesty means people don't want to work with you, because you are not a dependable partner. So you gotta make sure that any lies you tell pay off /big./

Re: CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

#14

Post by ndonnellan »

kneebonian wrote: post #5

For those hearing of this game for the first time and think it sounds fun. Be warned, it is considered to be a game that will end friendships that have lasted for years, and monopoly is considered to be a game that causes less bad feelings. An AI may be able to speak like a person but will never be able to hang onto that long burning simmering hatred from when Brad didn't support my army and instead flipped on me by…

If you want all these things and exponential growth, check out Neptune's pride: https://np.ironhelmet.com/ for basically "diplomacy in space with a few extra dimensions". I haven't played in a few years (it was great at the beginning of the pandemic), but it was a lot of "fun" in the same way that diplomacy is "fun". Except with a space theme and a lot of anxiety waking up at 2am hoping your fleet arrives at an empty star system and doesn't get immediately obliterated.

Re: CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

#15

Post by tullianus »

bee_rider wrote: post #9
kneebonian wrote: post #5

For those hearing of this game for the first time and think it sounds fun. Be warned, it is considered to be a game that will end friendships that have lasted for years, and monopoly is considered to be a game that causes less bad feelings. An AI may be able to speak like a person but will never be able to hang onto that long burning simmering hatred from when Brad didn't support my army and instead flipped on me by…

I have heard this about various games (Risk and Settlers of Catan mostly). I don’t get it. The point of these games is to be a bastard. If everyone goes into it with the understanding that there will be double crosses, how could there be hurt feelings? Monopoly is worse; it is just boring, I would dump my friends if they suggested monopoly not because I was hurt by their ruthless gameplay but for their terminally tas…

Two features that make Diplomacy particularly bad:

1. Length. An in-person game can last easily 12 hours, and is mentally exhausting. Getting 10 hours in and THEN getting screwed by your friend feels worse than a game with less time investment.

2. Design. It's difficult to survive the opening few hours without alliances, but only one player can win, so everyone is incentivized to defect at exactly the moment they think they can make greater gains by defecting than by cooperating. Being betrayed, even if you survive, forces a total rethink of strategy and ruins the next hour or two of gameplay.

Re: CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

#16

Post by jaylaal »

bee_rider wrote: post #9
kneebonian wrote: post #5

For those hearing of this game for the first time and think it sounds fun. Be warned, it is considered to be a game that will end friendships that have lasted for years, and monopoly is considered to be a game that causes less bad feelings. An AI may be able to speak like a person but will never be able to hang onto that long burning simmering hatred from when Brad didn't support my army and instead flipped on me by…

I have heard this about various games (Risk and Settlers of Catan mostly). I don’t get it. The point of these games is to be a bastard. If everyone goes into it with the understanding that there will be double crosses, how could there be hurt feelings? Monopoly is worse; it is just boring, I would dump my friends if they suggested monopoly not because I was hurt by their ruthless gameplay but for their terminally tas…

Many people can't mentally context switch for game and aren't prepared for the behavior that is required of the game from those that can. It's an assault on their world view.

Re: CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

#17

Post by bee_rider »

tuzongyu wrote: post #2

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade9097 Abstract: Despite much progress in training AI systems to imitate human language, building agents that use language to communicate intentionally with humans in interactive environments remains a major challenge. We introduce CICERO, the first AI agent to achieve human-level performance in Diplomacy, a strategy game involving both cooperation and competition that emp…

> Cicero participated anonymously in 40 games of Diplomacy in a “blitz” league on webDiplomacy.net

> Cicero ranked in the top 10% of participants who played more than one game and 2 nd out of 19 participants in the league that played 5 or more games.

> As part of the league, Cicero participated in an 8-game tournament involving 21 participants, 6 of whom played at least 5 games. Participants could play a maximum of 6 games with their rank determined by the average of their best 3 games. Cicero placed 1st in this tournament.

This bit seems a little more impressive I think. Being in the top 10% of people who’ve played at least two games might leave a lot of bad players to beat up on. Winning a tournament might (?) mean you have to beat at least a couple players who understand the thing.

It is sort of funny to think about — anyone who gets really legitimately good at anything competitive goes through multiple rounds of being the best in their social group, and then moving on from that group to a new one that is comprised of people who were the top-tier of that previous level. It isn’t obvious to me where on that informal ladder this tournament was.

But anyway, maybe the AI will follow the trajectory of chess AIs and quickly race away from human competition.

Re: CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

#18

Post by tullianus »

O__________O wrote: post #12

Possible I missed it, but I don’t see any reference to how they addresses chat thread continuity (aka memory) issues that are major issue for AI chat bots. Did they address this and if so, how?

I think this might be a strength of Diplomacy for current AI models - making contradictory plans with two different players is a perfectly normal human move, as is saying one thing and doing another, as is cooperating on round N and defecting on round N+1.

Re: CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

#19

Post by elijaht »

bee_rider wrote: post #9
kneebonian wrote: post #5

For those hearing of this game for the first time and think it sounds fun. Be warned, it is considered to be a game that will end friendships that have lasted for years, and monopoly is considered to be a game that causes less bad feelings. An AI may be able to speak like a person but will never be able to hang onto that long burning simmering hatred from when Brad didn't support my army and instead flipped on me by…

I have heard this about various games (Risk and Settlers of Catan mostly). I don’t get it. The point of these games is to be a bastard. If everyone goes into it with the understanding that there will be double crosses, how could there be hurt feelings? Monopoly is worse; it is just boring, I would dump my friends if they suggested monopoly not because I was hurt by their ruthless gameplay but for their terminally tas…

I would say Diplomacy specifically has features that make it cause hurt feelings almost intrinsically

1. It's a long game- after hours of play, getting doubled crossed unexpectedly sucks because of how much you have invested 2. The game almost purely relies on cooperation/other players. So double crossing someone really screws them- it almost certainly means I have no recource (luck, dice rolls, individual tactics). Getting double crossed feels like you got CRUSHED in such a complete way that I haven't felt in many other games

I have played a few times with a few social groups. Most were aware of the point of the game and enthusiastic going in, but even with that, people's feelings got hurt quite a bit.

I will say that Risk/Catan don't really cause the same feelings when we play. Diplomacy feels like a whole different level

Re: CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

#20

Post by pesenti »

Paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade9097

Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/diplomacy_cicero

Site: https://ai.facebook.com/research/cicero/

Expert player vs. Cicero AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5192bvUS7k

RFP: https://ai.facebook.com/research/request-for-proposal/toward...

The most interesting anecdote I heard from the team: "during the tournament dozens of human players never even suspected they were playing against a bot even though we played dozens of games online."

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