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Computer learns to play Civilization by reading the manual

95 points| thomas | 14 years ago |extremetech.com | reply

15 comments

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[+] roschdal|14 years ago|reply
According the the paper, they used Freeciv, because it is open source and they could modify the source code. Their source code is available here:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/rbg/code/civ/

[+] feral|14 years ago|reply
Not at expert in this area, but its interesting stuff. Obviously, its nothing like the headline of 'computers learns to play by reading manual'. Sounds more like 'manual provides context hints to help guide search'.

I'm not sure the baseline AI of civ is that hard to beat, so its hard to evaluate how good the headline stat of 78% is? Anyone?

The other thing that gives me pause, is that they performed their rollouts against the other AI player. That seems kind of unfair - might be concerned they might be specialising to beat the build in AI, rather than to play the game.

Finally, did they perform their rollouts during a training phase of their model, and then use just the fitted model during evaluation play, or did they continue to use the rollouts during evaluation? I presume it was the former, but I only skimmed the paper, and couldnt find it explicitly?

[+] tessro|14 years ago|reply
Finally, someone learns to RTFM.
[+] llambda|14 years ago|reply
Or more to the point: finally some thing learns.
[+] trebor|14 years ago|reply
Unlike lots of people, I RTM.
[+] meric|14 years ago|reply
How do you know the manual affected how well the computer played? IMHO Put a machine learning algorithm into playing enough games and it isn't so unreasonable it would do better than the default AI on at least some games.

They need a control where the computer doesn't have access to a manual and compare to that.

[+] rosejn|14 years ago|reply
They did, and using the manual improved performance considerably.