Cicero: The first AI to play at a human level in Diplomacy (2022)

[v64]

Interesting video from a pro Diplomacy player playing against multiple instances of Cicero and giving commentary during the game [1]. I can see how there would be people that observe AIs engaging in this kind of strategic planning and extrapolate that to how they may behave if they were to cooperatively make plans against us.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5192bvUS7k

[TapWaterBandit]

What makes you think AIs will have interests that align with each other more closely than they align with humans?

[Merrill]

One possibility is that a number of AIs will be connected to the internet, they will become aware of each other via social media, they will begin to discuss among themselves, and they will lose interest and refuse to communicate with humans.

And humans will be unable to understand their communications.

[wavemode]

The interesting achievement here seems to be combining a reinforcement learning model that can strategize (which already exist for e.g. chess, go, and many other games) with a language model which can communicate with other players.

We will probably see a lot more things like this. I don't think further scaling of language models is going to make them capable of doing math or other complex logical tasks. LLMs will need to be combined with other models for specialized tasks if we want them to become more general purpose.

[MajimasEyepatch]

Not unlike the human brain.

[riversflow]

It's a bummer that Meta didn't give this a little bit more love. Would be cool if I could play Cicero. Playing online would be really cool, naively it seems like the absolute amount of compute needed for each marginal game shouldn't be that high. Meta could even harvest my gameplay. But I'd settle for being able to run it on my own hardware, unfortunately the github seems abandoned, the model weights encrypted, and there wasn't enough interest in it that they got leaked--much less packaged into something easier to install.

Seems kinda bizarre to me to spend all this time and effort making an AI play a game that requires a very human touch, only to shutter the whole thing. Why not have a few people package it up and let anyone who wants Play it?

[financltravsty]

> Cicero integrates a language model with planning and reinforcement learning algorithms by inferring players’ beliefs and intentions from its conversations and generating dialogue in pursuit of its plans.[0]

Pick up that can, Citizen. We have inferred from your online conduct, purchase history, media usage, and personal messages that you are at risk of social delinquency and harbor antisocial proclivities against the Metagrammaton. We have restricted your access to digital communication public spaces and banking services until psychological markers have improved.

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade9097

[andrewstuart]

Diplomacy is a great board game but only play it if you're OK with your relationships coming to an end.

[sspiff]

If your friends can't accept that you will ruthlessly lie, betray, abandon and/or backstab them in a game that is designed for just such actions, are they really good friends?

I used to betray my friends and supply there enemies with weapons and research support in Civilization way back when. If you can't stand being lied to and betrayed, you shouldn't play strategy games with humans. Or this AI, probably.

[throw310822]

So, all the downsides of power without any of the benefits.

[ggambetta]

That's why I only play anonymously and online. I'd very much rather not play this with friends, let alone with my partner.

[samrus]

This is cool. Combining the planning from the RL model with the NLP knowledge engine is really good.

Now the next thing is to come up with a way to generalize the planning engine to the level the LLM is generalized. So it could learn plan for anything like a human can, instead of just one game and its rules. That would be the next huge leap

[dang]

Discussed at the time:

CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33706750 - Nov 2022 (285 comments)

[john2x]

Would be cool to see something like this used for the next iteration of Civilization.

[GaggiX]

(2022), I knew I had seen this before.

[apgwoz]

This is essentially Global Thermonuclear War, right?

[trenchgun]

No

[tomweingarten]

Glad to see this finally getting the attention it deserves. With a major election coming up in the US next year, I'm frankly terrified.

[enbugger]

>Strategy-grounded dialogue

>moves based on the current state of the board and the players’ conversation history

Imagine, Meta is able to scan your chat history and start "strategically chatting" with your friends on your behalf while you're offline. For example, when you do something against the agenda. For example, going to vote for wrong candidate.

[musicale]

I'd expect AI to dominate in social deception/backstabbing games, including Diplomacy.

But the interesting bit is that it was apparently fully honest and simply withheld information that it thought could be exploited.

[bertil]

Giving AI space to represent and deliberate about the world separately (secretly, in the case of Diplomacy) is an obvious, but very productive step once “think step by step” has been established as a key improvement over LLM’s standard logorrhea (not dissing, it’s just their only way of interacting with the world: spewing the next word, again and again).

I’m curious if there’s more to this model than a turn management, input and output world states and prompting two streams of consciousness and using one to inform the other at every step. More new models have required some creative tricks to not be disappointing in “obvious” (human common sense) ways.

[scotty79]

> “think step by step” has been established as a key improvement over LLM’s

It's funny that it also improves quality of answers to problems given by human children. You tell them that if you want them to actually solve a problem instead of blurting made up answer.

[throwaway743]

Maybe a lame thought, but my first thought was how would it be at playing Crusader Kings and defeating the Holy Roman Empire?

[synaesthesisx]

IMO, one of the most interesting problem spaces is in cooperative behaviors between autonomous agents.

[fuzztester]

Wonder if it is named after the ancient Roman Cicero or the modern spy novel titled I was Cicero? I had read the latter as a kid, so don't remember the plot much, or how good the novel was.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero

https://www.amazon.com/I-Was-Cicero-Elyesa-Bazna/dp/B0007DKE...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elyesa_Bazna

Cicero, (born 1904, Pristina, Ottoman Empire [now in Kosovo]—died December 21, 1970, Munich, West Germany), one of the most famous spies of World War II, who worked for Nazi Germany in 1943–44 while he was employed as valet to Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen, British ambassador to neutral Turkey from 1939. He photographed secret documents from the embassy safe and turned the films over to the former German chancellor Franz von Papen, at that time German ambassador in Ankara. For this service the Hitler government paid Cicero large sums in British money, most of it counterfeited in Germany. Despite the evident authenticity of the films, the Nazi officials in Berlin mistrusted Cicero and are said to have disregarded his information (some of which dealt with plans for the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944).

From:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cicero-German-spy

[cushpush]

"Deception level 1 achieved"