The future of diplomacy may well be in the hands of bots
(Picture: Kubrick exhibition/Design Museum/Columbia Pictures)Artificial intelligence (AI) has proven time and time again that it can trounce even the best human players once it has absorbed enough data on a specific topic. The best Chess, Go and even Starcraft 2 players have fallen foul to DeepMind in recent years, suggesting that strategy is AI’s forte.
However, some games require more than strategy. They demand softer skills, such as the ability to be diplomatic or duplicitous — skills that it’s easy to assume AI can’t easily mimic. Even this idea might be human arrogance, though, because Meta has created a new AI bot, dubbed Cicero, that has become one of the top 10 per cent of players in the world at the popular online game, Diplomacy – without blowing its non-human facade. Meta has recently spilled the beans on how this all played out in a research paper.
