I think I met Deep Red

[PolarBoy]

First, some background on Deep Red. Deep Red is a computer that IBM developed to play mafia better than any human player. As town or scum it always wins, and I hear the final release will be able to win as SK too. None of that is true. Deep Red is a throwaway joke someone told on the old forum. Then somebody logged on as Deep Red and posted "

Vote: IS

" and we all had a good laugh and forgot about it. Then during sign-ups for the test game Deep Red appeared long enough to say "

Vote: IS

" which Antrax took to be a sign-up. After being accused of it Dourgrim denied being Deep Red, who was promptly replaced by a real player. Deep Red appeared during the game once, and mainly said "

Vote: IS

", with a little extra. Anyway, to my story:

Ok, so I was at the library the other day, browsing the Mafia forum, when I realized that this total stranger was looking over my shoulder. I asked him if I could help him, and he said something to the effect of "I was just watching to see if this is any fun." I asked if he knew what mafia and MafiaScum were, and he said something cryptic about having signed up for "the beta" and then having decided that it didn't look like much fun when he saw "the e-mail". I told him that I had private messages to write and that I didn't have time to give him a tour of the site, and that he could find it himself at www.mafiascum.net and that everything was fairly self-explanatory, and he left.

So what I was thinking that maybe "the beta" was the test game and "the e-mail" was the role PM Antrax sent to Deep Red, which, according to Antrax, was read by somebody. Anyway this is pretty wierd. Will the real Deep Red please stand up?

[mathcam]

I'm pretty sure I

invented

Deep Red, and I think I remember knowing who posted as him last time, but I can't remember. I think it might have been Leonidas or Cadmium, but I think that might have just been the "Werebear's Mom" username. Now

that

was funny. Sigh... good times. Good times.

Cam

[d8P]

No friend, this goes higher. Much higher.
It goes all the way to the top.
mith is the real deep red.

[Wacky]

Do you think it would be possible to have some kind of mafia playing program competition? Would be pretty interesting, if possible.

[mathcam]

Hmm, that would be interesting. The individual programs certainly wouldn't be too hard to write. Too bad it would be such a pain in the ass figuring out to get them to play with each other. I guess we could each write our own program, and then post whatever it tells us to.

Cam

[Norinel]

I think you'd probably have to come up with some sort of common communication protocol, since reading and writing English is kind of difficult. Of course, that makes it harder to do stylistic suspicions and such.

[Stewie]

how could you possibly do a program that can play mafia? And besides, if you could, it would be human-based, so I think a human would play better. Or at least the human that created it.

[mathcam]

Given most people's programming skills, there is no doubt in my mind that a human could outplay a computer,

especially

if the human got to see the computer's source code. I could certainly play better than anything I could prorgam, and I consider myself a fairly decent coder.

What I had envisioned was a very simplistic approach...the game is simple. A cop, a doc, a couple of mafia, and the rest townies. A sample non-code algorithm would look like:

[BEGIN]
- Check your role.
[IF TOWNIE]:
- Role claim if bandwagonned.
- Vote randomly from people who haven't claimed.
[IF COP OR DOC]:
- Role claim if bandwagonned.
- Vote randomly from people who haven't claimed.
- Expose false claimants to your role.
- Protect important role claimees at night, unless none, then protect randomly.
[IF MAFIA]
- If 3 players left and bandwagonned, claim an important role that's missing. If more than 3, claim townie.
- Vote randomly, with strong preference going to members not from your clan of mafia.
- Don't attack claimed roles at night.

Obviously this is very simplistic and I can already see several places I'd want to improve my program. There would be little in the way of actual posting going on...little in the way of garnericng suspicions (except for checking past voting records). I think it would be really fun. Anyone interested could write their own program and post what your program tells it to. At the end, we all reveal our source.

Cam

[Norinel]

I could probably do something along those lines if I had some spare time, but perhaps a slightly different strategy to it.

What I meant about a common post format would be something along the lines of the one official way to role claim be "Roleclaim: X", and voting would be "[random] vote: X [for somereason]".

And I don't think I'd necessarily stop at one cop and one doc, but all the potential roles should definitely be known beforehand.

[mathcam]

Oh yeah, I meant to mention that. I definitely agree with that...then these responses can be fed back into our own home programs and let them decide what they want to do in response.

Cam

[Stewie]

how would you program that? VisualBasic? Anyways, too much work.

[mathcam]

I was thinking java, myself. But you could write it in even in basic: It's a very simple program, really. The one slightly tricky part that I can think of right away is getting it to "load" the thread every time you run it.

Cam

[PolarBoy]

I think it would be pointless to try making a straight out program for playing Mafia. It would probably only be able to play a limited set of possible games and definitely could not handle themed games or special roles. Better would probably be a genetic algorithm based system that would watch for and test patterns. Similarily to programs that watch the stock markets. If I knew anything about genetic algorithms I might go now to try and build a program that I could feed a thread into and it would tell me who the mafia was. Such a program would be easier to create than a stock market program too, since guessing that somebody is, say, a member of the mafia will out loud will not change the fact that they are any more than guessing it privatetly, unlike with the stock market, where actual buying and selling of stocks affects the stock market, unlike just saying "buy" or "sell" and then having everybody ignore you because they know that you don't know how your decisions will affect the market.

Unfortunately all I know about genetic algorithms came from my brother's science fair project several years ago and I have absolutely no knowledge of computer programming.

Such a program could change the face of mafia though.

By the way, who is Deep Red?

[mole]

I told mith to include mafia playing AI in the new boards... we ended up deciding they'd lynch us all due to "human error jeapordising the town's chances" or something.

[gslamm]

I worked on an IRC script based mafia mod. It was way easier to code than a player would. I scrapped it since it was more fun to handle the details myself. It is still a good way to check balance though. Random voting assuming mafia will not vote for each other (and players will not pick up on that.) Cops will vote random until sanity confirmed. ...

[mathcam]

PB, the points of this exercise was not to create the best program for playing mafia, or to see whether or not computers could beat humans, though these are both interesting questions. Genetic algorithms would have a hard time figuring out mafia, simply because there is so much to process in terms of what actions caused what result. Better might be a neural network.

In any case, this was an attempt to see how various people could approach the task of computer mafia, and see who's computer would do best. We could even restrict it to a couple hundred lines of code or something.

Cam

[PolarBoy]

Technically a genetic algorithm program doesn't need to determine the actual cause and effect of anything. Only in what ways a player acts differently if they are scum. And anyway, that's the approach I would use if I knew anything more than the absolute basics on the subject.