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Poster
Real World Games Look Like Spinning Tops
Wojciech Czarnecki · Gauthier Gidel · Brendan Tracey · Karl Tuyls · Shayegan Omidshafiei · David Balduzzi · Max Jaderberg

Tue Dec 08 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PST) @ Poster Session 1 #390
in Poster Session 2 »

This paper investigates the geometrical properties of real world games (e.g. Tic-Tac-Toe, Go, StarCraft II). We hypothesise that their geometrical structure resembles a spinning top, with the upright axis representing transitive strength, and the radial axis representing the non-transitive dimension, which corresponds to the number of cycles that exist at a particular transitive strength. We prove the existence of this geometry for a wide class of real world games by exposing their temporal nature. Additionally, we show that this unique structure also has consequences for learning - it clarifies why populations of strategies are necessary for training of agents, and how population size relates to the structure of the game. Finally, we empirically validate these claims by using a selection of nine real world two-player zero-sum symmetric games, showing 1) the spinning top structure is revealed and can be easily reconstructed by using a new method of Nash clustering to measure the interaction between transitive and cyclical strategy behaviour, and 2) the effect that population size has on the convergence of learning in these games.

Author Information

Wojciech Czarnecki (DeepMind)
Gauthier Gidel (Mila)

I am a Ph.D student supervised by Simon Lacoste-Julien, I graduated from ENS Ulm and Université Paris-Saclay. I was a visiting PhD student at Sierra. I also worked for 6 months as a freelance Data Scientist for Monsieur Drive (Acquired by Criteo) and I recently co-founded a startup called Krypto. I'm currently pursuing my PhD at Mila. My work focuses on optimization applied to machine learning. More details can be found in my resume. My research is to develop new optimization algorithms and understand the role of optimization in the learning procedure, in short, learn faster and better. I identify to the field of machine learning (NIPS, ICML, AISTATS and ICLR) and optimization (SIAM OP)

Brendan Tracey (DeepMind)
Karl Tuyls (DeepMind)
Shayegan Omidshafiei (DeepMind)
David Balduzzi (XTX Markets)
Max Jaderberg (DeepMind)

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