Tim Baarslag of CWI's Intelligent and Autonomous Systems group has been awarded with the "Best Early-Researcher Paper Award" at the Agreement Technologies (AT2018) conference in Bergen, Norway. Baarslag won the award for the paper titled "The Challenge of Negotiation in the Game of Diplomacy", co authored by: Dave de Jonge, Reyhan Aydogan, Catholijn Jonker, Katsuhide Fujita, and Takayuki Ito.
Abstract
The game of Diplomacy has been used as a test case for complex automated negotiations for a long time, but to date very few successful negotiation algorithms have been implemented for this game. We have therefore decided to include a Diplomacy tournament within
the annual Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC). In this paper we present the setup and the results of the ANAC 2017 Diplomacy
Competition and the ANAC 2018 Diplomacy Challenge.We observe that none of the negotiation algorithms submitted to these two editions have
been able to signicantly improve the performance over a non-negotiating baseline agent. We analyze these algorithms and discuss why it is so
hard to write successful negotiation algorithms for Diplomacy. Finally, we provide experimental evidence that, despite these results, coalition
formation and coordination do form essential elements of the game.
The 6th International Conference on Agreement Technologies (AT2018) December 6-7, 2018, Bergen, Norway. The International Conference Series on Agreement Technologies is an interdisciplinary forum that brings together researchers and practitioners working on the various topics comprising this emergent and vibrant field. It provides an avenue to discuss and exchange new ideas and techniques for the design, implementation and verification of next generation open distributed systems centred on the notion of agreement among computational agents.
For this paper Baarslag collaborated with IIIA-CSIC, Bellaterra, Spain, Western Sydney University, Australia, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan, and Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
