Strategic Negotiation and Trust in Diplomacy – The DipBlue Approach

The study of games in Artificial Intelligence has a long tradition. Game playing has been a fertile environment for the development of novel approaches to build intelligent programs. Multi-agent systems (MAS), in particular, are a very useful paradigm in this regard, not only because multi-player games can be addressed using this technology, but most importantly because social aspects of agenthood that have been studied for years by MAS researchers can be applied in the attractive and controlled scenarios that games convey. Diplomacy is a multi-player strategic zero-sum board game, including as main research challenges an enormous search tree, the difficulty of determining the real strength of a position, and the accommodation of negotiation among players. Negotiation abilities bring along other social aspects, such as the need to perform trust reasoning in order to win the game. The majority of existing artificial players (bots) for Diplomacy do not exploit the strategic opportunities enabled by negotiation, focusing instead on search and heuristic approaches. This paper describes the development of DipBlue, an artificial player that uses negotiation in order to gain advantage over its opponents, through the use of peace treaties, formation of alliances and suggestion of actions to allies. A simple trust assessment approach is used as a means to detect and react to potential betrayals by allied players. DipBlue was built to work with DipGame, a MAS testbed for Diplomacy, and has been tested with other players of the same platform and variations of itself. Experimental results show that the use of negotiation increases the performance of bots involved in alliances, when full trust is assumed. In the presence of betrayals, being able to perform trust reasoning is an effective approach to reduce their impact.