Making diplomacy bots individual

Kemmerling M., Ackermann N., Preuss M.


Abstract
Diplomacy is a round-based strategy game with simple rules but a real-time component as players move in parallel. It also emphasizes negotiation between players, which is difficult to realize in a bot but essential to achieve a human-like playing style. In a previous work, we found that in Turing Tests, players mainly use three usual shortcomings of current bot implementations to identify them as computer players, a certain level of playing strength which makes planning necessary, the avoidance of mistakes, that is moves a human most likely would not use, and a meaningful communication. According to previous results, it seems to be especially hard to combine well-playing with a human-like move style. While the communication problem has already been treated successfully at least for short games, currently known CI-based bots do not plan ahead. We present a planning Diplomacy bot which employs the negotiation kernel of an already existing bot and apply our believability measure technique in a new and interesting way. Instead of learning how to minimize the number of bad moves according to a mixture of games of several players-this had proved difficult as different players regard different moves as bad or computer-like-we go a step into the direction of mimicking human player styles by using only saved games of one person each. We thus effectively create a bot which is playing well, including planning, uses basic communication and partly inherits the playing style of a specific human player. The different obtained bots are compared according to playing strength and believability.



Publication type
Research article (book contribution)

Peer reviewed
Yes

Publication status
Published

Year
2013

Book title
Believable Bots: Can Computers Play Like People?

Editor
Hingston, P

Start page
265

End page
288

Volume
null

Publisher
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Language
English

ISBN
9783642323225

DOI

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