CICERO is claimed to be an AI that can engage and compete with people in gameplay using strategic reasoning and natural language.

Meta (formerly Facebook) (NASDAQ: META) announced on Wednesday the launch of CICERO, the first artificial intelligence (AI) agent to achieve human-level performance in the popular strategy game Diplomacy. So far, Diplomacy was a huge challenge to AI given that the game needs human like capabilities such as persuasive conversation, complex planning, strategies and their adjustment and an understanding of other players’ perspectives and motivations. (Meta)

Diplomacy: A game about people rather than pieces

CICERO demonstrated its abilities by playing on webDiplomacy.net, an online version of the game, where it achieved more than double the average score of the human players and ranked in the top 10 percent of participants who played more than one game.

This shows CICERO can negotiate, persuade, and cooperate with people.

CICERO is made up of a controllable dialogue model for Diplomacy coupled with a strategic reasoning engine. At each point in the game, CICERO looks at the game board and its conversation history, and models how the other players are likely to act. It then uses this plan to control a language model that can generate free-form dialogue, informing other players of its plans and proposing reasonable actions for the other players that coordinate well with them.

According to Andrew Goff, Diplomacy world champion, CICERO “plays the situation as it sees it.”

“So it’s ruthless in executing to its strategy, but it’s not ruthless in a way that annoys or frustates other players.”

Open code

Meta has open-sourced the code and published a paper to help the wider AI community use CICERO to spur further progress in human-AI cooperation.

“Open science and open source are crucial for the health of the AI research ecosystem,” said Percy Liang, Director, Center for Research on Foundation Models at Stanford University’s Institute For Human-Centered AI. “It is great to see Meta AI continuing its culture of openness with this release, which will allow researchers to build on top of this work.”

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