

Computer learns to play Civilization by reading the manual - thomas
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/90046-computer-learns-to-play-civilization-by-reading-the-instruction-manual

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colanderman
The source article is way more informative:
[http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/language-from-
games-0712....](http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/language-from-
games-0712.html)

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m_myers
And was already submitted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2762783>

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roschdal
According the the paper, they used Freeciv, because it is open source and they
could modify the source code. Their source code is available here:

<http://groups.csail.mit.edu/rbg/code/civ/>

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feral
Not at expert in this area, but its interesting stuff. Obviously, its nothing
like the headline of 'computers learns to play by reading manual'. Sounds more
like 'manual provides context hints to help guide search'.

I'm not sure the baseline AI of civ is that hard to beat, so its hard to
evaluate how good the headline stat of 78% is? Anyone?

The other thing that gives me pause, is that they performed their rollouts
against the other AI player. That seems kind of unfair - might be concerned
they might be specialising to beat the build in AI, rather than to play the
game.

Finally, did they perform their rollouts during a training phase of their
model, and then use just the fitted model during evaluation play, or did they
continue to use the rollouts during evaluation? I presume it was the former,
but I only skimmed the paper, and couldnt find it explicitly?

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rosejn
You make good points, but there are a few factors you have to think about.
First, the built-in AI has been designed by people with great knowledge of the
game and its strategy. The fact that a totally generic AI system with zero
knowledge of the game can learn on the fly and beat the hand-tuned AI is
pretty impressive.

They were training online during gameplay, so each round started fresh with an
untrained system.

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feral
>The fact that a totally generic AI system with zero knowledge of the game can
learn on the fly and beat the hand-tuned AI is pretty impressive.

Yes; but, like, Samuel's learning checker playing programs in the 50s and 60s
did that.

>They were training online during gameplay, so each round started fresh with
an untrained system.

I'm not really sure how that is considered training. Like Tim_Benham's
comment, on a first read of the paper, I would be concerned that the AI is
beating to inbuilt AI due to what could be termed 'save-game cheating'. And
there's still the issue of whether it is overspecialised to just exploit the
inbuilt AI in some way.

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prosa
Finally, someone learns to RTFM.

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llambda
Or more to the point: finally some _thing_ learns.

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burgerbrain
What is the difference? Software is software, differences in hardware are
boring and growing narrower.

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meric
How do you know the manual affected how well the computer played? IMHO Put a
machine learning algorithm into playing enough games and it isn't so
unreasonable it would do better than the default AI on at least some games.

They need a control where the computer doesn't have access to a manual and
compare to that.

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moozilla
> They need a control where the computer doesn't have access to a manual and
> compare to that.

Which is exactly what they did:
<http://people.csail.mit.edu/regina/my_papers/civ11.pdf>

