A Generic Agent Architecture for Cooperative Multi-agent Games

The goal of this dissertation is to propose a high level generic architecture for the development of agents able to effectively play games with strong social components and a mix of competition and cooperation. Traditional techniques used in the context of games include a combination of heuristics and searching strategies like minimax, Branch & Bound as well as Monte-Carlo approaches; however, these techniques are difficult to apply to this category of games, due to the often enormous search trees and the difficulty in calculating the value of a player’s position or move. We propose a generic agent architecture that tackles the subjects of negotiation, trust and opponent modeling, simplifying the development of agents capable of playing these games effectively by introducing modules to handle these challenges in addition to a traditional strategic module. This architecture is split into four independent modules, taking inspiration from the structure of a wartime nation: the President, the Strategic Office, the Foreign Office and the Intelligence Office. We demonstrate the application of this architecture by instantiating it using two different games – Diplomacy and Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow – and testing the obtained agents in a variety of scenarios against existing agents. The results obtained show that the architecture is generic enough to be applied in a wide variety of games. Furthermore, the inclusion of modules to handle negotiation, trust reasoning and opponent modeling allows for more effective agents.