Bot can beat humans in multiplayer hidden-role games

MIT researchers have developed a bot equipped with artificial intelligence that can beat human players in tricky online multiplayer games where player roles and motives are kept secret.

Many gaming bots have been built to keep up with human players. Earlier this year, a team from Carnegie Mellon University developed the world’s first bot that can beat professionals in multiplayer poker. DeepMind’s AlphaGo made headlines in 2016 for besting a professional Go player. Several bots have also been built to beat professional chess players or join forces in cooperative games such as online capture the flag. In these games, however, the bot knows its opponents and teammates from the start.

At the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems next month, the researchers will present DeepRole, the first gaming bot that can win online multiplayer games in which the participants’ team allegiances are initially unclear. The bot is designed with novel “deductive reasoning” added into an AI algorithm commonly used for playing poker. This helps it reason about partially observable actions, to determine the probability that a given player is a teammate or opponent. In doing so, it quickly learns whom to ally with and which actions to take to ensure its team’s victory.

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