Could we add bots to variant maps?

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DarthPorg36
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Could we add bots to variant maps?

#1 Post by DarthPorg36 » Sun Dec 19, 2021 2:21 pm

I'm not really good at coding, so I have no idea how much work this is, but, I'd love to be able to train on variants against bots and not hope a game comes around soon enough and that I get a new country or can test a new strategy. I think the site could be more enjoyable if there were more bot game options.

Just an idea though, no pressure.
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Re: Could we add bots to variant maps?

#2 Post by goldfinger0303 » Mon Dec 20, 2021 12:07 am

The bots are not developed by the webDip team. We facilitate their integration with the site, but that is all.

It's an incredible amount of work with teams of people and AI researchers to make the functional bots we have currently.

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Re: Could we add bots to variant maps?

#3 Post by DarthPorg36 » Mon Dec 20, 2021 12:51 am

As I expected. Totally understandable. :)

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Re: Could we add bots to variant maps?

#4 Post by Mercy » Mon Dec 20, 2021 10:19 am

It would be interesting for the development team to train bots on randomly generated maps, so that they can perform on any variant, current and future. But of course, if you train them on data from human games, then that is not possible.

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Re: Could we add bots to variant maps?

#5 Post by LeonTrotsky » Tue Apr 11, 2023 2:20 am

I think this is a fantastic idea. Wondering if there have been any developments on this front in the last couple years since this was raised?

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Re: Could we add bots to variant maps?

#6 Post by kestasjk » Tue Apr 11, 2023 9:04 am

Developments in the last two years are that we now run the bots on our own hardware, and understand them a bit better (unfortunately not as much as I'd like.. but watch this space).

Something that's quite interesting about the bot development process is that making a perfect Diplomacy bot actually depends on who you're playing against. Meta trained a set of bots that could communicate and play with each other, and they invented their own incomprehensible language, and were great at playing against each other, great at playing against 1-2-3 humans, but were terrible at playing against 4(?)-5-6 humans. (Even gunboat bots followed this pattern)

This shows that you can't train decent bots from playing against themselves on Diplomacy, you need human training data, and for many variants there isn't much data to go on. (Bear in mind webDip's almost 20 year long dataset for Classic was still not as much as they would've liked)


I think it'd be a great learning exercise to take the second most popular variant which we have the 2nd most data for and try to train bots on that dataset, but first priority re: bots is to get a full-press bot working, and to add difficulty levels to classic.
Probably then the next variant feature I'd like to add would be point and click style for variants. Adding bots to variants is fairly low on the todo list unfortunately, I'd be surprised if we get there by 2025, unless someone with a lot more AI know how than myself steps in.

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