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DiplomacyJohn Newbury 23 May 2012 |
Home > Diplomacy
AI in the Game of Diplomacy
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TinKing | DeepLoamSea | BlabBot |
BlabBotBase
DEMO | MARS | SAGA
| ARENA | DTDT
Tournaments | Etiquette
| Cogitations
Miscellaneous
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The standard Game of Diplomacy is available from Avalon Hill (owned by Hasbro, and with various earlier distributors). Briefly this is a war board-game, with formal deterministic rules of play, effectively made simultaneously by all players, after (usually secret) open-ended negotiation and other information exchange between players, wherein lies most of the interest, skill and difficulty. See Rules of Diplomacy, 4th edition, 2000. As well as face to face, it is often played remotely; for example, via email, sometimes with automated adjudication.
In the late 1960s I used to play it regularly, face to face, and once, in 1984, by email (which I won!). More recently I have been much more interested in the possibility of writing a program to play it, using artificial intelligence (AI), which has always been my main intellectual interest. I am publishing details here that may be helpful to others wishing to do likewise, to solicit feed-back on my ideas before they become too entrenched to change, and to spur me into action.
The views expressed in this web are personal, not necessarily official or even generally agreed. Much material is paraphrased from elsewhere, for clarity or emphasis, or as bait to elicit comment in case I am mistaken or misguided.
See the News page for recent significant changes to this web. These will always be announced on DipAi.
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 the Diplomacy AI Development Environment (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. See my DAIDE outline.
See TinKing for details of my private Diplomacy project, based on the public DAIDE project. TinKing inherits all goals, and so forth, of the public project, adding to them or overriding them as appropriate (compare with a C++ class). Hopefully there are not too many differences in the projects.
See Bots for those that I have obtained.
See Downloads for all DAIDE products that can be downloaded form this site, including those are not currently available elsewhere on the Web.
See DeepLoamSea for details of the main DAIDE bot (Diplomacy playing program) that I am developing. The full name of my subproject to develop it is TinKing/DeepLoamSea, but the bot and its project are commonly abbreviated to DLS.
See BlabBot for details of the DAIDE bot that I am developing as a framework for all press syntax, and more. The C++ source will be released here in due course. The full name of my sub-project to develop it is TinKing/BlabBot, but the bot and its project are commonly abbreviated to BB.
See BlabBotBase for details of the bot-independent core of BlabBot, used in BB version 3 onwards, and DLS version 2 onwards. This is commonly abbreviated to BBB.
See DEMO for details of my system for ongoing comparison of released bots and variants and the various significant settings of Server and bots, including the MARS testing program, associated SAGA database and ARENA analysis.
See Tournaments for details of my early ad hoc Tournament Director, DTDT, and the tournaments that I have run with it. However, DTDT and all these results are now subsumed within DEMO.
See Etiquette for the official DAIDE Etiquette rules, and some further rules that my bot would follow and expect.
See Roadmap for an outline of my future plans for my Diplomacy project.
See Cogitations for my current, often speculative ideas on various aspects of my Diplomacy project.
Diplomacy AI Centre (the master DAIDE page, containing or linking to essential software and documentation, but not always latest)
David Norman's Diplomacy page (a supplementary DAIDE page; source of the latest documentation and software that he has written)
DipAi – Diplomacy AI (a Yahoo discussion group, mainly tending to deal with DAIDE; for the latest announcements, problem resolution and future development)
RTDip (a Yahoo discussion group for general discussion of Real Time Diplomacy games played over the Internet)
Wikipedia Diplomacy Game page (game outline and links in online encyclopaedia, for those who did not know of the game)