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Player of Games

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Re: Player of Games

#101

Post by fho »

anonymoushn wrote: post #75
fho wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried my hand once or twice at (re-)implementing board games [0], so that I could run some common "AI" algorithms on the game trees. What tripped me up every time is that most board games have a lot of "if this happens, there is this specific rule that applies". Even relatively simple games (like Homeworlds) are pretty hard to nail down perfectly due to all the special cases. Do you, or somebody else, have any reco…

Dominion and Homeworlds are pretty complicated! Maybe you can start with a simpler game like Splendor. In my 2-player Splendor rules engine, the following actions are possible: 1. Purchase a holding. (90 possible actions, one for each holding) 2. If you do not have 3 reserved cards, reserve a card and take a gold chip if possible. (93 possible actions, one for each holding and one for each deck of facedown cards) 3.…

I actually played Splendor for the first (three) time(s) some time ago and honestly didn't really like it. It's a very simple game, true. I feel like there are not many decision points for me as a player and therefore there is not much strategy involved. But maybe that is just my view after very few games.

(At the same time that probably makes it a good choice for a game implementation)

Thing is that for all my examples above I had a "good" reason to implement that specific game:

1. Dominion (shortly after it came out) To evaluate strategies to best my friends (obviously). 2. Eclipse Has a nice rock-paper-scissors type of ship combat, where you can counter every enemy build (if you have enough time and resources). Calculating the odds of winning would be interesting. 3. Homeworlds Seems to be a very fascinating game. But without any players to compete with [0] ... AI to the rescue ;-)

[0] I am aware of SDG where I could play online, but that site is in decay mode. Getting an account involved mailing the maintainer and those times I tried to start a game no players showed up.

Re: Player of Games

#102

Post by nixed »

tsbinz wrote: post #82

Comparing against Stockfish 8 in a paper released today and labeling it as "Stockfish" is bordering on being dishonest. The current stockfish version (14) would make AlphaZero look bad, so they don't include it ...

the same goes for slumbot in poker, its super old like 2013, the game is played completely different now and current bots would destroy it.

Re: Player of Games

#103

Post by gman83 »

arvinsim wrote: post #93
stavros wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this, it was excellent. I've only read a few Banks books, but this was my favorite.

I started with Consider Phlebas but stopped because it seems too slow for me. Does it get better in the later chapters?

I couldn't get through the cannibal part of Consider Phlebas, was soo weird.

Re: Player of Games

#104

Post by LudwigNagasena »

fho wrote: post #74
BeenChilling wrote: post #63

I want to see deepmind make a bot to play team based first person shooters like csgo and rainbow6 siege, to stack up five of them against a team of professional players.

Honestly that probably won't be too interesting as (a) one AI could perfectly control several agents (ie perfect coordination of global strategies) and (b) an AI has low to no reaction times and perfect aim (aimbots already have that) so I would expect that would quickly result in a slaughterfest.

(a) make them independent (b) add 100-200ms delay

Re: Player of Games

#105

Post by TaupeRanger »

mudlus wrote: post #69

Yawn, show me a computer that game make fun games

You're getting downvotes but honestly I agree. Who cares about board games? We should've moved on from this once we "solved" chess and Go. There are more important things and it's not remotely surprising that a computer can beat a human when there's a simple, abstract optimization problem to throw computing power at. Make it creative...now that's a challenge worthy of the top AI talent.

Re: Player of Games

#107

Post by fxtentacle »

iwd wrote: post #97
fxtentacle wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal experience was the opposite. I'm currently trying different approaches for building a Bomberman AI for the Bomberland competition that was discussed here on HN a few weeks ago. "IMPALA with 1 learner takes only around 10 hours to reach the same performance that A3C approaches after 7.5 days." says the paper, but I can run A3C on a cheap CPU-only server but to get that IMPALA timing, I need to spend a lot…

Not an expert, but I believe many papers on other video games make a single decision for the next X frames at once, possibly including a delay factor that governs exactly when to act. I think OpenAI’s Dota2 agent does this.

I have experimented with that, too, but in my case it also multiplies the number of potential actions. If I have 7 actions per timestep, grouping them into 3-timestep blocks means I now have 777 = 343 possibilities to choose from.

From what I understand, the OpenAI Dota 2 AI has a long-term strategy module which was mostly trained by imitating 60,000+ replays played by human professional teams. My problem with doing that for the Borderland competition is that I don't have any data source for replays of someone playing the game really well. You control 3 units simultaneously and it's 2 teams against each other, so I'd need 6 dedicated volunteers playing the game for many hours to create a reasonably-sized corpus of human replays. And who says that those people are good at it?

Re: Player of Games

#108

Post by Severian »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #91

I didn't even know about the book until I read the comments here, I thought it was a reference to the Grimes song. Funny coincidence the song and the engine would appear so close in time to one another.

The Grimes song is a reference to the book too. She also has Marain subtitles in her video for "Idoru", which is the language used in The Culture. Weird mix of two author's (Idoru being William Gibson) works to be sure.

Re: Player of Games

#110

Post by newswasboring »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #105
mudlus wrote: post #69

Yawn, show me a computer that game make fun games

You're getting downvotes but honestly I agree. Who cares about board games? We should've moved on from this once we "solved" chess and Go. There are more important things and it's not remotely surprising that a computer can beat a human when there's a simple, abstract optimization problem to throw computing power at. Make it creative...now that's a challenge worthy of the top AI talent.

I agree. I have always wondered if I can feed GPT-3 a bunch of rule books and ask it to generate game rules.
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