Diplomacy Software From: kdb@chinet.chi.il.us (Karl Botts) Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1990 06:24:56 +0000 In response to my email request for information about Diplomacy software, Eric Klien replied: (I hope he will forgive me for replying in an open letter, in hopes of stimulating a wider conversaion in rec.games.pbm) > Software for playing Diplomacy is only good for GMing games. > Computers make very poor opponents. COMPUTER DIPLOMACY by Avalon > Hill is lousy, a better game is JUDGE for IBM compatibles published > by someone in Canada. (I'll get you the info if you want it.) > > Again, computers are only good for GMing games, not as opponents. > > Eric Klien I was thinking more along the lines of something that would assist a human playing Diplomacy; help him to organize his information, manage his communications, analyze scenarios, and so forth. This would appear to involve many of the same capabilities as would be needed to GM a game; thus, I would be interested in what you know about such software. I'd like to gather some info about what has been done, and get some other people's thoughts about what should be done, as well as getting a few more games under my belt so I can form my own opinions. Perhaps an article and some discussion in your Diplomacy Zine would ensue. Eventually, I'd give some consideration to developing something. I think you mentioned somewhere that you haven't gotten around to playing Blind Diplomacy yet; you should. One of the reasons I have been thinking about such software is that I believe the Blind variation potentially adds an order of magnitude of complexity to the game, if only you could manage the complexity. What I mean is that, in regular Dip there is a single state of the game at any time (call it "reality"), and a set of variables describing the future behavior of the players. The future states of the game vary on these variables only (I make the implicit assumption that predicting the future states of the game would be helpful in winning.) But in Blind Dip there are an arbitrary number of present states of the game, dependent on your evaluation of the information available to you. The state is indeterminate even if you restrict yourself to what you know to be true, i.e., what you can "see", because this information is incomplete. But if you also consider other information -- what other players have told you _they_ can see -- the state is even less determinate, varying with the veracity of your informants. Furthermore, the variables describing the future behavior of the other players are also less constrained, because they now vary with the information available to the players. This in turn varies, in part, on something you can immediately control, that is, what you tell the other players. The effect of this control is indeterminate too, however; you can tell them whatever you like but you cannot make them believe you. We humans generally deal with such situations by ruthlessly pruning the tree of possibilities down to something we can manage, which is pretty close to a single trunk. In other words, we pick one, or a small set, of the possible states of the game, label it "reality", and then proceed essentially as though it were known to be true. We humans are not good at managing multiple alternate realities. So it occurs to me that some software that could store and manipulate versions of Diplomacy Reality would be especially helpful in playing Blind Dip. Here's a small example of a concrete area where it might be useful: One problem of information management that immediately arises in Blind Dip is that, following each move, you often report the results of your moves to one or several allies; it is possible that these reports will differ. In future negotiations with the various parties it is necessary to remember what the contents of your recent reports to them were, or estrangements may occur. This tends to necessitate much grepping through mail messages and scribbling on pieces of paper, a process which is tiresome and error prone. It would be useful to have a program that would generate a screenful or two of information summarizing recent position reports transmitted to another player, while negotiating with or considering policy about him. If I were to impose a little discipline on the way I compose such reports using a general text editor or emailer, I could readily write a shell script to dig this info out for me, sort it, format it, and whatever. Of course, this would be mininal functionality; I can imagine special report editors, databases and managers... The possibilities are many. I just got to wondering if such a system already existed for regular diplomacy, and if I might be able to extend it for use with Blind Dip. Have you heard of anything along these lines? -- Karl Botts kdb@chinet.chi.il.us ...{mcdchg|att|nucsrl|gargoyle}!chinet!kdb Work, M-F 10-6 CST more or less: 312-630-9880 Home: 312-493-8152 Referenced By Up