Leverage AI to Learn, Optimize, and Wargame (LAILOW) for Strategic Laydown and Dispersal (SLD) of the USN Operating Forces

NPS NRP Technical ReportThe SECNAV disperses Navy forces in a deliberate manner to support DoD guidance, policy and budget. The current SLD process is labor intensive, takes too long, and needs AI. The research questions are: - How does the Navy weight competing demands for naval forces between the CCMDs to determine an optimal dispersal of operating forces? - How does the Navy optimize force laydown to maximize force development (Fd) and force generation (Fg) efficiency? We propose LAILOW to address the questions. LAILOW was derived from the ONR funded project and focuses on deep analytics of machine learning, optimization, and wargame. Learn: When there are data, data mining, machine learning, and predictive algorithms are used to analyze data. Historical Phased Force Deployment Data (TPFDDs) and SLD Report Cards data among others, one can learn patterns of what decisions were made and how they are executed with in the past. Optimize: Patterns from learn are used to optimize future SLD plans. A SLD plan may include how many homeports, home bases, hubs, and shore posture locations (Fd) and staffs (Fg). The optimization can be overwhelming. LAILOW uses integrated Soar reinforcement learning (Soar-RL) and coevolutionary algorithms. Soar-RL maps a total SLD plan to individual ones used in excursion modeling and what if analysis. Wargame: There might be no or rare data for new warfighting requirements and capabilities. This motivates wargame simulations. A SLD plan can include state variables or problems (e.g., future global and theater posture, threat characteristics), which is only observed, sensed, and cannot be changed. Control variables are solutions (e.g., a SLD plan). LAILOW sets up a wargame between state and control variables. Problems and solutions coevolve based on evolutionary principles of selection, mutation, and crossover.N3/N5 - Plans & StrategyThis research is supported by funding from the Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Program (PE 0605853N/2098). https://nps.edu/nrpChief of Naval Operations (CNO)Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.

Procedural Content Generation for Real-Time Strategy Games

Videogames are one of the most important and profitable sectors in the industry of entertainment. Nowadays, the creation of a videogame is often a large-scale endeavor and bears many similarities with, e.g., movie production. On the central tasks in the development of a videogame is content generation, namely the definition of maps, terrains, non-player characters (NPCs) and other graphical, musical and AI-related components of the game. Such generation is costly due to its complexity, the great amount of work required and the need of specialized manpower. Hence the relevance of optimizing the process and alleviating costs. In this sense, procedural content generation (PCG) comes in handy as a means of reducing costs by using algorithmic techniques to automatically generate some game contents. PCG also provides advantages in terms of player experience since the contents generated are typically not fixed but can vary in different playing sessions, and can even adapt to the player herself. For this purpose, the underlying algorithmic technique used for PCG must be also flexible and adaptable. This is the case of computational intelligence in general and evolutionary algorithms in particular. In this work we shall provide an overview of the use of evolutionary intelligence for PCG, with special emphasis on its use within the context of real-time strategy games. We shall show how these techniques can address both playability and aesthetics, as well as improving the game AI

Impossibility Results in AI: A Survey

An impossibility theorem demonstrates that a particular problem or set of problems cannot be solved as described in the claim. Such theorems put limits on what is possible to do concerning artificial intelligence, especially the super-intelligent one. As such, these results serve as guidelines, reminders, and warnings to AI safety, AI policy, and governance researchers. These might enable solutions to some long-standing questions in the form of formalizing theories in the framework of constraint satisfaction without committing to one option. In this paper, we have categorized impossibility theorems applicable to the domain of AI into five categories: deduction, indistinguishability, induction, tradeoffs, and intractability. We found that certain theorems are too specific or have implicit assumptions that limit application. Also, we added a new result (theorem) about the unfairness of explainability, the first explainability-related result in the induction category. We concluded that deductive impossibilities deny 100%-guarantees for security. In the end, we give some ideas that hold potential in explainability, controllability, value alignment, ethics, and group decision-making. They can be deepened by further investigation

Turing Learning: Advances and Applications

Turing Learning is the family of algorithms where models and discriminators are generated in a competitive setting. This thesis concerns the coevolutionary framework of Turing Learning and investigates the advances for improved model accuracy and the applications in robotic systems. Advances proposed in this thesis are as follows: an interactive approach to enable the discriminator to genuinely influence the data sampling process; a hybrid formulation to combine the benefits of the interactive discriminator in improving model accuracy and the advantages of the passive discriminator for reducing training cost; an exclusiveness reward mechanism to promote candidates with the exclusive performance during the coevolutionary process. Applications presented in this thesis are as follows: an approach for a mobile robotic agent to automatically infer its sensor configuration; an approach for the robot agent to automatically calibrate its sensor reading; a novel approach to infer swarm behaviours from their effects on the environment. The interactive approach has been validated in the inference of sensor configuration and calibration model, leading to the self-modelling/self-discovery process of robotic agents. Results suggest an improved model accuracy with the interactive approach in both cases, compared with the passive approach. The hybrid formulation and the exclusiveness reward mechanism have been demonstrated in the inference of the calibration model. Results show that almost half of the training cost can be reduced without a decrease in model accuracy by applying the hybrid formulation. The novel reward mechanism can accelerate the convergence without a decrease in model accuracy. The indirect way of inferring swarm behaviours requires a small amount of training and reveals novel behavioural controllers for individual robots

Cooperative Coevolution for Non-Separable Large-Scale Black-Box Optimization: Convergence Analyses and Distributed Accelerations

Given the ubiquity of non-separable optimization problems in real worlds, in this paper we analyze and extend the large-scale version of the well-known cooperative coevolution (CC), a divide-and-conquer optimization framework, on non-separable functions. First, we reveal empirical reasons of why decomposition-based methods are preferred or not in practice on some non-separable large-scale problems, which have not been clearly pointed out in many previous CC papers. Then, we formalize CC to a continuous game model via simplification, but without losing its essential property. Different from previous evolutionary game theory for CC, our new model provides a much simpler but useful viewpoint to analyze its convergence, since only the pure Nash equilibrium concept is needed and more general fitness landscapes can be explicitly considered. Based on convergence analyses, we propose a hierarchical decomposition strategy for better generalization, as for any decomposition there is a risk of getting trapped into a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. Finally, we use powerful distributed computing to accelerate it under the multi-level learning framework, which combines the fine-tuning ability from decomposition with the invariance property of CMA-ES. Experiments on a set of high-dimensional functions validate both its search performance and scalability (w.r.t. CPU cores) on a clustering computing platform with 400 CPU cores