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