MIT scientists teach a computer Civ II

[Omega124]

Cool experiment. I'd like to play against the MIT AI in Civ5.

Who you would then destroy because it wasn't designed for that game.

 

[Thorn]

That computer will never be productive again.

 

[Birdjaguar]

From Today's paper:

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/

The paper edition also had a screen shot from a Civ 2 game.

A Computer That Reads the [Darn] Manual
By Christopher Shea

Researchers have shown that a computer can master the video game Civilization II—in part by reading the manual.

In Civilization II, players decide how to deploy entities like settlers and explorers, on a map of the world divided into squares; the goal is to dominate as many squares as possible.

Like other artificial-intelligence programs, this new one, devised by researchers at M.I.T. and University College London, took in information about game circumstances and predicted the outcome of hundreds of moves each turn. It looked 20 moves down the line, for each of some 500 possible moves.

But in some cases it also scanned the manual, which is 35,000 words long and which, importantly, offers broad strategic guidance rather than a list of rules to follow. That’s one of the differences between this study and one from 2009, also from the lab of M.I.T.’s Regina Barzilay, in which a computer generated scripts for installing computer software by consulting the directions on Microsoft’s help site.

Without looking at the manual, the program won 46% of its games against the game’s built-in automated opponent. But when it read the guidelines, its win rate jumped to 79%.

“Learning to Win by Reading Manuals in a Monte-Carlo Framework,” S.R.K. Branavan, David Silver and Regina Barzilay, Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011)

PS As Ars Technica, which has similar taste in headlines to mine, notes, the Wall Street Journal played a bit part in this study. To explore whether the program was properly identifying relevant sentences, the researchers in one test added random sentences from the Journal to the manual’s text.

The program identified the correct sentences a disappointing 72%, on average—although the figure was 94% in the first 25 game steps.

Contrary to what Ars Technica says, however, the researchers do explain this finding in their paper. The manual focuses on the early stages of the game—unsurprisingly, they say, since it is intended for first-time players. Therefore, the manual becomes less relevant as each game progresses.

But as with chess, a well-executed initial strategy can set the tenor for games of Civilization II, which would help to explain why reading the manual still led to more wins, even if it became less relevant in long games.

 

[Verarde]

Interesting schtuff.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

there is no tactic in the manual
this is just plain impossible

if that was true then they could apply it to chess who has a "manual" much more shorter and learn the game

i hardly doubt that could work

manual =//= tactics
knowing the rules doesnt teach you to play

both for human and ofc for ai

I know it's been a week since this post, but I just wish to reply.

That is exactly how the AI learned. You give it a set of moves and let it figure out winning combinations of moves. (I am simplifying things quite a bit though) That is in fact pretty much how Chess AI works. It's just that chess is a bit of a different game than Civ.

Teaching AI is not about teaching it some 'winning' tactic, it is about giving it some set of actions and some criteria for these actions and letting it figure things out on its own. That is how modern rudimentary AIs work really. You can provide them guidance, but the whole point is that they figure out the 'tactics' on their own.

In this case, the manual provided additional information that helped the AI make a set of decisions that more reliably led to winning against the game's internal AI.


In fact, knowing the rules is precisely what leads to knowing how to play. The rules, and the actions they allow are exactly the building blocks of play. Take a simple rule from chess: knights move in an L-shaped pattern, skipping over everything but their landing square. This is a rule. It does not give you any 'play' as you put it, but that rule creates an action -- moving the knight in a specific pattern. Now, take that rule and combine it with all the many other rules. They each create specific allowed actions. These actions are then combined by the players into the 'play'. Without the rules, there is no play.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Threads merged.