More Victories, Less Cooperation: Assessing Cicero's Diplomacy Play

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Cicero, an advanced AI for Diplomacy, focusing on its communication abilities, revealing it excels in strategy but still struggles with deception and persuasion in human-AI interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze in-game communication and provides empirical insights into Cicero's communication strengths and limitations in human-AI diplomacy.

Findings

Cicero outperforms humans in strategic gameplay.

AI communication is limited in deception and persuasion.

Cicero relies heavily on strategic play rather than communication.

Abstract

The boardgame Diplomacy is a challenging setting for communicative and cooperative artificial intelligence. The most prominent communicative Diplomacy AI, Cicero, has excellent strategic abilities, exceeding human players. However, the best Diplomacy players master communication, not just tactics, which is why the game has received attention as an AI challenge. This work seeks to understand the degree to which Cicero succeeds at communication. First, we annotate in-game communication with abstract meaning representation to separate in-game tactics from general language. Second, we run two dozen games with humans and Cicero, totaling over 200 human-player hours of competition. While AI can consistently outplay human players, AI-Human communication is still limited because of AI's difficulty with deception and persuasion. This shows that Cicero relies on strategy and has not yet reached the full promise of communicative and cooperative AI.