Computer learns to play Civilization by reading the manual

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

by thomas • 15 years ago

95 15 15 years ago

extremetech.com

colanderman• 15 years ago

The source article is way more informative: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/language-from-games-0712....

m_myers• 15 years ago

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

btcoal• 15 years ago

Or better yet, the conference paper: http://people.csail.mit.edu/regina/my_papers/civ11.pdf

Very interesting.

roschdal• 15 years ago

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/

feral2• 15 years ago

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?

Tim_Benham• 15 years ago

There's nothing in the paper that makes it clear that their claimed results aren't the result of save game cheating.

rosejn2• 15 years ago

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.

tessro• 15 years ago

Finally, someone learns to RTFM.

llambda• 15 years ago

Or more to the point: finally some thing learns.

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

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

trebor• 15 years ago

Unlike lots of people, I RTM.

meric• 15 years ago

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.

moozilla• 15 years ago

> 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

rosejn2• 15 years ago

They did, and using the manual improved performance considerably.

Computer learns to play Civilization by reading the manual

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