The Hanabi Challenge: A New Frontier for AI Research

From the early days of computing, games have been important testbeds for studying how well machines can do sophisticated decision making. In recent years, machine learning has made dramatic advances with artificial agents reaching superhuman performance in challenge domains like Go, Atari, and some variants of poker. As with their predecessors of chess, checkers, and backgammon, these game domains have driven research by providing sophisticated yet well-defined challenges for artificial intelligence practitioners. We continue this tradition by proposing the game of Hanabi as a new challenge domain with novel problems that arise from its combination of purely cooperative gameplay with two to five players and imperfect information. In particular, we argue that Hanabi elevates reasoning about the beliefs and intentions of other agents to the foreground. We believe developing novel techniques for such theory of mind reasoning will not only be crucial for success in Hanabi, but also in broader collaborative efforts, especially those with human partners. To facilitate future research, we introduce the open-source Hanabi Learning Environment, propose an experimental framework for the research community to evaluate algorithmic advances, and assess the performance of current state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, In Press (Artificial Intelligence

Evolution of a supply chain management game for the trading agent competition

TAC SCM is a supply chain management game for the Trading Agent Competition (TAC). The purpose of TAC is to spur high quality research into realistic trading agent problems. We discuss TAC and TAC SCM: game and competition design, scientific impact, and lessons learnt

SIMBA: a simulator for business education and research

Business simulators are used for decision-making since different scenarios can be evaluated without risk. They are also used in business management education. The main goal of this paper is to introduce SIMBA (SIMulator for Business Administration), a new simulator that serves as a web-based platform for business education, permitting both classroom and distance education. This paper also adds a research aspect in business intelligence because SIMBA can be used as a fieldwork tool for the development and evaluation of intelligent agents. The simulator creates a more complex competitive environment in which intelligent agents play the role of business decision makers.This work has been partially sponsored by a regional project CCG08-UC3M/TIC-4141 of the Comunidad de Madrid, a national project TIN2008-06701-C03-03 of the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain and a contract with Simuladores Empresariales S.L.Publicad

Exploiting Opponent Modeling For Learning In Multi-agent Adversarial Games

An issue with learning effective policies in multi-agent adversarial games is that the size of the search space can be prohibitively large when the actions of both teammates and opponents are considered simultaneously. Opponent modeling, predicting an opponent’s actions in advance of execution, is one approach for selecting actions in adversarial settings, but it is often performed in an ad hoc way. In this dissertation, we introduce several methods for using opponent modeling, in the form of predictions about the players’ physical movements, to learn team policies. To explore the problem of decision-making in multi-agent adversarial scenarios, we use our approach for both offline play generation and real-time team response in the Rush 2008 American football simulator. Simultaneously predicting the movement trajectories, future reward, and play strategies of multiple players in real-time is a daunting task but we illustrate how it is possible to divide and conquer this problem with an assortment of data-driven models. By leveraging spatio-temporal traces of player movements, we learn discriminative models of defensive play for opponent modeling. With the reward information from previous play matchups, we use a modified version of UCT (Upper Conference Bounds applied to Trees) to create new offensive plays and to learn play repairs to counter predicted opponent actions. iii In team games, players must coordinate effectively to accomplish tasks while foiling their opponents either in a preplanned or emergent manner. An effective team policy must generate the necessary coordination, yet considering all possibilities for creating coordinating subgroups is computationally infeasible. Automatically identifying and preserving the coordination between key subgroups of teammates can make search more productive by pruning policies that disrupt these relationships. We demonstrate that combining opponent modeling with automatic subgroup identification can be used to create team policies with a higher average yardage than either the baseline game or domain-specific heuristics

Programming Robosoccer agents by modelling human behavior

The Robosoccer simulator is a challenging environment for artificial intelligence, where a human has to program a team of agents and introduce it into a soccer virtual environment. Most usually, Robosoccer agents are programmed by hand. In some cases, agents make use of Machine learning (ML) to adapt and predict the behavior of the opposite team, but the bulk of the agent has been preprogrammed. The main aim of this paper is to transform Robosoccer into an interactive game and let a human control a Robosoccer agent. Then ML techniques can be used to model his/her behavior from training instances generated during the play. This model will be used later to control a Robosoccer agent, thus imitating the human behavior. We have focused our research on low-level behavior, like looking for the ball, conducting the ball towards the goal, or scoring in the presence of opponent players. Results have shown that indeed, Robosoccer agents can be controlled by programs that model human play.Publicad

Correcting and improving imitation models of humans for Robosoccer agents

Proceeding of: 2005 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC'05),Edimburgo, 2-5 Sept. 2005The Robosoccer simulator is a challenging environment, where a human introduces a team of agents into a football virtual environment. Typically, agents are programmed by hand, but it would be a great advantage to transfer human experience into football agents. The first aim of this paper is to use machine learning techniques to obtain models of humans playing Robosoccer. These models can be used later to control a Robosoccer agent. However, models did not play as smoothly and optimally as the human. To solve this problem, the second goal of this paper is to incrementally correct models by means of evolutionary techniques, and to adapt them against more difficult opponents than the ones beatable by the human.Publicad