Diplodocus - The AI That Conquered Gunboat Diplomacy

Oh so many things to comment. So first of all, I miss the meta tournament. I played (I think) over a hundred games in 3 months and because of that, my skill level improved significantly. I'm also happy to be part of both games analyzed here. About the first game, I did not remember it, but I did remember you prioritizing Scandinavia over your homeland as England in some other games, which wasn't a strategy I was familiar with. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with this, but I remember you doing this in a game in which I was a particularly stubborn Germany, repeatedly and uselessly attacking your Denmark, and therefore inducing you to believe I was the bot and only encouraging you more to go for Scandinavia and leave Britain to France. About the second game, I did remember it. As the Turkish player, I think I was also worried Italy might be the bot and that's why I decided to prop you up. I'm not sure what would have happened if I allied wth Italy, but I had a feeling I would be better served by siding with you as my junior partner in an alliance. In the end, being 1 dot over Italy, I can't complain too much. Interestingly, I executed almost the same exact anti-Austrian stab as Italy in a recent gunboat game I played. Austria was, as far as I know, a very strong player, but no one expects Tunis to be convoyed in Austria and Trieste to move to Vienna after you build 2 fleets in 1902. I was not aware I was copying the meta AI, when I did it I thought it was a spontaneous idea, but the mind is complex and probably I had memorized something of game 100 in my subconscious. I was about to comment that I think the bot would do worse on boards constituted by 6 high level players (and I think some meta games were like that, with 6 players with lots of dipcoins countering the bot pretty well). But you did say (almost) the same thing at the end of the video. That said, it would do worse not because it would be outclassed, but because its skill level would be, more or less, matched by the other players. I think Diplodocus is currently the best gunboat player in existence, or at least in the top 5. Their results are astonishing.

Absolutely fascinating. Persuading someone is a difficult task in general, but even more so in Gunboat. The AI seems to have mastered wordless communication and pushing all the right buttons in humans. I guess its because thats all the AI has ever done. Kind of like putting on a blindfold and fighting against a blind person.

diplodocus is a great name

You can find the paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2210.05492 It's really hard to overstate how impressed I was with Diplodocus-High in particular. I'm not 100% happy with this video, because I don't think it conveys what happened in the tournament as well as a full series would have - but it became pretty obvious we were never going to have time to cover the whole thing, so it was this or nothing! Happy to answer questions about it in the comments if anyone has any.

Very interesting video.

This just seems like magic

Re: the Denmark disband topic around 20:00 What if the bot was also considering that their army in Brest was going to be force disband (or result in a build somehow), so it might have an opportunity to rebuild F DEN as an army? Yes, this idea is moot if Austria takes Munich. But I would still say it's the better play, because Munich retreating to Kiel is effectively the same outcome as this disbanding F DEN move?

Great!

It's incredible how much shit those bots had to deal with and still win the tournament lmao, where's the bot's YouTube channel ;)

@DiploStrats would you be able to link the games that you talk about in the description of the video?

i want to see more games with bots like this

Hello, what version of the game are you using. Where can I find it?

Magnificent, diplomacy players creating an AI takeover scenario just because they wanna play against good AIs

h-WHAT

Intuitively I'd expect any self-learning algorithm to do better at imitation the more it plays with humans. Which is obviously tricky to arrange. Also, https://youtu.be/-fPREC6Cies

Not sure about Diplodocus but not too impressed by your game style, sorry: abandoning your home centers is a no-no: you bound youself to have no build and make your fortress where the others want to expand. I just jumped as replacement for Austria into a (press, not gunboat) game where the Italian had done almost exactly that: take Tri, convoy the other army to Tunis and the first thing I knew is that Italy was not my friend. The stab Diplodocus made on you was almost exactly what I would have done in its position but, for starters I would never have grabbed Tri, because I think it sends the exact wrong signal: war.