DiplomacyDAIDEJohn Newbury 28 November 2005 |
AI in the Game of Diplomacy: DAIDE
DAIDE stands for the Diplomacy AI Development Environment.
On and off, in the late 1990s, I considered the possibility of, and issues involved in, using artificial intelligence (AI) to play Diplomacy (against combinations of cloned or rival bots (programs) or humans) but I never wrote any notes, let alone a program. However, I have renewed my interest in this since late 2004 when I discovered DAIDE, which already provides a framework for this, as well as a community of developers and other interested people, in a Yahoo discussion group (DipAi) and some rival bots to play against.
Briefly, DAIDE provides a protocol for running a Diplomacy game between any combination of AI bot programs or humans, and a coordinating server program, with optional observer programs, distributed on one or more computers, possibly remotely on the Internet. It is platform independent – there are development kits for C++ and Java – but it is currently only fully implemented for Windows. 'Press' (negotiation and other communication between players) is also implemented by means of a formal language (though free text can be allowed), the permitted level being set in a given game. A program called Mapper displays the game position graphically and can act as an observer or as in interface for a human player. It translates the formal press syntax into English, and assemble correct formal press syntax from menus of options.
When I refer to the Server or Framework, I mean David Norman's, that was originally the only one referenced by the Official DAIDE site. There is at least one other implementation of a server, by Eric Wald.