Codazen & FAIR 3rd party dev work

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kestasjk
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Codazen & FAIR 3rd party dev work

#1 Post by kestasjk » Wed Nov 17, 2021 4:13 pm

Hi all,

As you all know we’ve been working with some third parties on developing Artificial Intelligence which can play the game Diplomacy. AI researchers have been interested in Diplomacy as a benchmark for AI research because of the many challenges inherent to the game: multiplayer cooperation and competition, acting under partial information due to the simultaneous turns, planning across multiple game phases, and more. If you haven’t already, you can check out the various bots on the Create Bot Game page.

I’m excited to announce that we’ve attracted interest from one of these organisations in supporting the website. I’m sure you all know that our team hasn’t had as much time for hobbyist development as we would like, and this has left our mid-2000s site in a mid-2000s state (despite some great improvements that have come in over time). Our research partners want to invest in contributing to the site under its existing open source license with a new design that will refresh the visuals and improve the experience playing, creating, and searching for games.

We have worked with MILA in the past, the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms, and the upcoming open source contributions are being done by Codazen with funding from FAIR, Meta’s fundamental AI research group. FAIR would like to help support the Diplomacy player community, to further the game as a go-to setting for research in Artificial Intelligence, and to make playing (including against bots, in particular) a better experience. All of these changes will be open-sourced on the WebDiplomacy github page, so please feel free to directly provide feedback on the changes, open issues if you find bugs, or even submit further code improvements for those inclined.

Some of the key things to be worked on include:
  • refreshing the in-game interface to make it more beautiful and add
  • point-and-click options for entering orders
  • making the in-game interface more friendly to mobile devices
  • more control over notifications to make it easy to keep up on active games
  • easier game browsing and creation
  • more responsive chat interface
  • better onboarding for new players, including a better experience for using the AI to practice / learn how to play
If you’re interested in learning more about the research going on in Diplomacy, you can check out the following papers:
Hope you’re all as excited as I am to see these changes come through. Big thanks to everyone that has been involved in making this happen behind the scenes.

You should start to see some new functionality introduced as opt-in features as things get moving, we'll post more info as it comes.

BR,
Kestas

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Re: Codazen & FAIR 3rd party dev work

#2 Post by TheFlyingBoat » Wed Nov 17, 2021 5:18 pm

This is huge! Major thanks to Meta and the WebDip Admin team for making this all possible!

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Re: Codazen & FAIR 3rd party dev work

#3 Post by RoganJosh » Thu Nov 18, 2021 2:12 pm

Great news!
Keep yourself posted: https://www.diplomacybriefing.com/

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Re: Codazen & FAIR 3rd party dev work

#4 Post by Squigs44 » Mon Nov 22, 2021 6:59 am

This is fantastic news

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Re: Codazen & FAIR 3rd party dev work

#5 Post by MajorMitchell » Mon Dec 27, 2021 1:43 am

Congratulations. I liked playing against the BlighterDalekBots.
I've had some interesting experiences with them when I've got to ~12scs and a defacto multi BlighterDalekBot alliance has formed against me & I get an army through their front line on /near the stalemate and attack unoccupied scs.

Getting involved with AI R&D is a fantastic opportunity to raise the profile of the game we love & influence it's evolution.

I had a spontaneous thought about playing the World variant against 16 BlighterDalekBots, how much fun that would be.

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Re: Codazen & FAIR 3rd party dev work

#6 Post by MajorMitchell » Mon Dec 27, 2021 1:57 am

In the future, one of the requirements of AI "servants" will be in the decision making process for the AI servants of when to obey a command and when to disobey.
What makes Jeeves a superb Valet, or Gentleman's Gentleman for Bertie Wooster is that Jerves knows when to disobey Bertie Wooster's instructions and implement a better decision, choose an alternative strategy that saves Bertie Wooster from hos own follies.
So making an AI entity make choices from a range of alternatives where there is no ideal , perfect choice clearly obvious is a real future need, capability of AI entities and Diplomacy is a fantastic tool for exploring that sort of stuff.

I'm not surprised that AI researchers can see huge advantages in using this webdiplomacy site for development work.

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Re: Codazen & FAIR 3rd party dev work

#7 Post by clicker » Wed Dec 14, 2022 2:50 pm

I was introduced to the game through the press related to Meta's research on WebDip! The new interface made it very easy to jump into the game. I was immediately enjoying the bot games (although I got crushed :-D ). Thank you to all for providing this incredible resource; looking forward to donate in the future.

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