Diplomacy is a 7 player board game in which players move armies and fleets across a map of Europe with the aim of becomming the sole ruler of the continent. An unusual feature of the game is that all moves are made simultaneously, after being written down, and that players are allowed to discuss the game privately in pairs before the moves are entered. Thus negotiating skill is an important game playing skill. The game has proved very suitable for online play, with discussions and submission of orders taking place by email. A program (called the judge) has already been written to automatically parse orders enterred in the correct format, forward secret messages, decide on the moves and return the results. There are around 2000 active judge players and the definitive web site is www.diplom.org
There are several variants of diplomacy, one of which is "No Press" diplomacy, or Diplomacy without the diplomacy. Diplomacy can still be conducted by the way moves are chosen. Moving all your armies towards a neighbour does not indicate that you want to be allied to him/her. This project will investigate ways of developing a no press diplomacy playing program. We are unlikely to develope a world champion AI program, but reaching the level of novice might be achievable. If te project goes well then it should be possible to arrange an annonymous game between human players and the AI.
The starting point will be a previous project which developed a quite good two player armies only program to develope AI tactics, and a reasonable 5 player armies only varient to explore alliance tactics.
An interest in strategy games such as chess would be helpful.