Bridge latest game to fall to AI

[ursaminortaur]

Bridge has become the latest game of skill to fall to an AI system - though admittedly the contest between eight world champions and the AI system omitted the bidding stage of the games.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/29/artificial-intelligence-beats-eight-world-champions-at-bridge

An artificial intelligence has beaten eight world champions at bridge, a game in which human supremacy has resisted the march of the machines until now.

The victory represents a new milestone for AI because in bridge players work with incomplete information and must react to the behaviour of several other players – a scenario far closer to human decision-making.

In contrast, chess and Go – in both of which AIs have already beaten human champions – a player has a single opponent at a time and both are in possession of all the information.

“What we’ve seen represents a fundamentally important advance in the state of artificial intelligence systems,” said Stephen Muggleton, a professor of machine learning at Imperial College London.

French startup NukkAI announced the news of its AI’s victory on Friday, at the end of a two-day tournament in Paris.

The NukkAI challenge required the human champions to play 800 consecutive deals divided into 80 sets of 10. It did not involve the initial bidding component of the game during which players arrive at a contract that they must then meet by playing their cards.
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Littman was disappointed the challenge didn’t include bidding, which is where much of the most interesting communication – and deception – happens in bridge.

But Nevena Senior, a many-times world bridge champion for England and one of NooK’s challengers, said the contracts the humans and NooK were given to play were sufficiently variable that the card game became as important as the bidding.

She said NooK’s creators had done a “magnificent” job. She found that it read its opponents better than the humans did, and was better able to exploit their mistakes.

“This is something that humans do after enough experience and I was pleasantly surprised that a robot mimics typical human skills,” she said.

[Lootman]

Bridge without bidding makes this a bit of a joke really. That is more like Whist.

What next? Poker without bidding?

[XFool]

This, I think, is the key takeaway:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/29/artificial-intelligence-beats-eight-world-champions-at-bridge

"AI researcher Véronique Ventos, NukkAI’s other co-founder, calls NooK a “new generation AI” because it explains its decisions as it goes along.

Explainability is a hot topic in AI. “Most of what the general public have heard in recent years about machine learning is based on black box systems such as AlphaGo, which is unable to explain to human beings how decisions are being made,” said Muggleton.

Instead, NooK represents a “white box” or “neurosymbolic” approach. Rather than learning by playing billions of rounds of a game, it first learns the game’s rules and then improves its play through practice. It is a hybrid of rules-based and deep learning systems. “The NooK approach learns in a way that is much closer to human beings,” Muggleton said.

“The pendulum is swinging towards these kinds of methods,” says Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University in Rhode Island. “Not being able to tell people what’s going on just doesn’t work in our societies.”

Even if a person or an AI can’t explain in words what they are doing, Littman says, their behaviour needs to be “legible” to others – enacting rules they understand.

This will be critical in domains such as health and engineering. Self-driving cars negotiating a junction will need to be able to read each other’s behaviour, for example."

[XFool]

More on this:

The Guardian view on bridging human and machine learning: it’s all in the game

The Guardian

A French startup may have cracked AI’s problem of trust with software that can learn better than humans – and express that learning

[9873210]

Bridge without bidding makes this a bit of a joke really. That is more like Whist.

What next? Poker without bidding?

Machine bidding could get interesting. Particularly if an AI is partnering with another AI and get to devise their own system.

AI's are quite unlike humans. AIs have essentially perfect memory and calculations. They can use far more complex hand evaluation than the common 4-3-2-1 high card point count. I'd expect them to devise something like precision club, only much more complex and without any discrete gadget (conventions), rather the deductions most of us get from conventions like blackwood would be folded into the main system. If they really want to mess with the humans they could change systems on alternate hands. Human bidding systems are very much limited by human capabilities and thought patterns. Most conventions are based on story telling.

Some experts do some of these things, and some of them are limited by rules some circumstances and considered unsporting by a few players. But AI could take them far further. IMHO it seems unfair in an open game to prohibit AIs from doing things just because a human can't understand even after a full explanation (which runs to many pages). What do you mean a 9 is worth 0.27 points unless you have a 7 which lowers it to .19?

[Newroad]

Hi 9873210.

I don't see hand evaluation of the kind you allude to being an issue - it's not that different than saying an unsupported queen is less valuable than a supported one (whether that's accurate is another matter!) - it's pretty easy to understand.

Where most angst occurs is with perceived (often incorrectly IMO) psychs and encrypted signals. I have no issue with either, as long as fully disclosed, nor do the laws of the game - it is only the playing regulations in certain jurisdictions which do. If AI were to wish to use these, it might cause grief in some places.

However, the explanation point you allude to but downplay is key - a critical requirement of the game is to put opponents on an equal information footing with partner, both from agreement and past experience. If the AI cannot reasonably do that in the normal playing time allocated to a deal (for tournament purposes) then it might reasonably be construed as having an unfair advantage.

Regards, Newroad