Any theory as to why the AI behaved this way in this game?

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Carl Tuckerson
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Any theory as to why the AI behaved this way in this game?

#1 Post by Carl Tuckerson » Sat Nov 02, 2019 6:36 am

First, sorry if this is the wrong forum for this. I don't know if this rises to the level of feedback and I wouldn't seriously consider this a bug report, but this seems like the best place for it.
Second, sorry if this proves to be an ignorant or unintelligent question.

I just finished this game:
https://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=254857

I played France, and I got hit by an early E/G alliance. At one point, England attacked Germany with Russian help, and from that point onward England and Germany were engaged in substantial hostilities with each other, actively going for each other's centers, etc. Germany even ends up taking Edinburgh.
Yet for some reason, despite this, the two of them both kept attacking me and dividing their attention. Germany I get, since his armies can't exactly attack England, but England prioritized trying to take English Channel from me (while I was doing nothing more than support holding it) over defending the North Sea and its home centers, and most egregiously England supported Germany into Belgium while the two of them were fighting over centers (the same turn that Germany took Edinburgh).
This behavior makes no sense to me. Why did the AI do this?

Some explanations I guessed at:
(1) I could just be missing something in the strategy of the situation that makes sense.
(2) The AI could have simply learned to be "spiteful" and acted accordingly. [acknowledging obviously that an AI isn't going to react out of emotion, but as it was trained through past games played by people who do, it might have learned that it's "supposed" to react to certain plays in the same way]
(3) This could just be a bizarre one-off play that the AI probably shouldn't make, but isn't a meaningful behavioral pattern.

To answer in turn...
(1) This one is always possible lol.
(2) Are there some known triggers for the AI behaving spitefully? I struggle to intuit the situations in which the AI reacts the way it does. It definitely benefits me at times (the AI struggles to stop solos because it can't figure out a way to disengage from another AI player), so it's clearly not something targeted at the player somehow.
(3) I don't have other handy examples but I've gotten the impression from other games that this isn't a one-off example. This particular one was absurd enough to me that I thought to post, but I suspect if I dug into it I could find other examples. I'm pretty confident there is something more than a one-off example here, but I recognize this answer is speculative.
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jmo1121109
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Re: Any theory as to why the AI behaved this way in this game?

#2 Post by jmo1121109 » Sat Nov 02, 2019 4:08 pm

The bots are taught via machine learning, which essentially means this question can't be answered. Best off the cuff guess, it learned from humans that France holding EC is considered aggressive against England.
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Carl Tuckerson
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Re: Any theory as to why the AI behaved this way in this game?

#3 Post by Carl Tuckerson » Sat Nov 02, 2019 10:54 pm

That makes sense to me. Shame that it didn't distinguish the cases a bit more carefully, but it is what it is.

Aside, are there any plans to allow concessions in 3+ player AI-only games, like we have in 1v1s? I faintly recall (perhaps wrongly) that concessions were initially not enabled in those games because y'all wanted to gather data.

ZhangYi
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Re: Any theory as to why the AI behaved this way in this game?

#4 Post by ZhangYi » Sun Nov 03, 2019 2:57 am

I mean, for a simple theory, what did you disband when Germany took Belgium?

Carl Tuckerson
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Re: Any theory as to why the AI behaved this way in this game?

#5 Post by Carl Tuckerson » Sun Nov 03, 2019 3:07 am

ZhangYi wrote:
Sun Nov 03, 2019 2:57 am
I mean, for a simple theory, what did you disband when Germany took Belgium?
My forwardmost fleet, which had a shot on Liverpool, so England would turn around and play defense. Guess that wasn't enough of a goodwill gesture to convince England to fight the country that was actually trying to kill him

Baldor
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Another example

#6 Post by Baldor » Tue Nov 12, 2019 3:36 am

Another example of strange bot behavior. Starting in 1905 of this game https://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=256149 , France stopped moving its units (nothing but hold orders) and let Italy walk into Spain and southern France. I understand it not attacking a friendly Germany, but ignoring the hostile Italy does not seem logical. Any ideas why this one happened?

Mercy
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Re: Any theory as to why the AI behaved this way in this game?

#7 Post by Mercy » Tue Nov 12, 2019 5:30 am

Maybe because the AI learnt from NMRing humans too?
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