An AI named Cicero can beat humans in Diplomacy, a complex alliance-building game. Here’s why that’s a big deal
In a rare piece of good news from Meta, artificial intelligence researchers at the company have just announced a scientific breakthrough. Their AI program named Cicero can now play the board game Diplomacy at a human level. Now, before you get too excited, Cicero isn’t playing at superhuman level. It was beaten by around 10% of the humans it played against. By comparison, in previous AI milestones, like AI beating humans in chess or Go, humans have long been completely surpassed.
DeepMind’s Go-playing AI is, for example, a “Go god” – according to the Chinese grandmaster Ke Jie. Even the human Go world champion would now lose 100-0 to the computer. Diplomacy is a simplified and abstract game, involving rival armies and navies invading, or not invading, each others’ territories. It’s fair to say it lacks the complexity and subtlety of the sort of diplomacy undertaken in the corridors of the United Nations.