TECH NEWS – Cicero could be a significant breakthrough in one game (yes, just one!), according to Meta.

According to the parent company of Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Cicero is the first artificial intelligence capable of human-level performance in Diplomacy, a popular strategy game. It was originally a board game with several official and unofficial sequels. The main element of the game is negotiation, and since it is a multiplayer game, a large part of Diplomacy consists of players negotiating with each other.

The post acknowledges that AI has beaten humans several times before, but we should add that Deep Blue was first destroyed by Garry Kasparov, a chess world champion, but later, the AI won. However, IBM refused the rematch. According to Meta, agents capable of truly useful, versatile moves must think beyond the board and not just about piece moves. Therefore, Cicero can negotiate and convince human players with whom cooperation is not impossible.

Diplomacy has long been a challenge for AI because it requires understanding the motivations of the other player and fine-tuning the strategy accordingly. Cicero, playing on webdiplomacy.net, scored more than double the average score of human players and finished in the top ten percent of those who played more than one match. For this reason, Meta writes that Cicero is so influential in the natural language used to negotiate with humans in Diplomacy that it was often preferred to work with him rather than other human players.

Rather than relying on traditional game-based reinforcement, Cicero used strategic reasoning (as in AlphaGo and Pluribus) and also incorporated natural language processing as used in GPT-3, BlenderBot 3, LAMDA, and OPT-175. The AI recognizes who to side with, and the software runs on an iterative planning algorithm that balances dialogue between consistency and rationality, predicting players’ next moves and fine-tuning plans accordingly.

According to Meta, Cicero could significantly impact AI chat assistants because of their ability to hold learning dialogues with humans, who can use it to learn new skills. Meta says we could imagine a game where NPCs design and talk like humans. They understand our motivations and adapt their dialogue to help us invade the castle.

Just make sure it doesn’t turn into Skynet. (True, it already exists in China under the name Sky Net. No kidding…)

Source: PCGamer