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Deep Reinforcement Learning from Self-Play in Imperfect-Information Games

Johannes Heinrich, David Silver

2016 · arXiv

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From the abstract

Many real-world applications can be described as large-scale games of imperfect information. To deal with these challenging domains, prior work has focused on computing Nash equilibria in a handcrafted abstraction of the domain. In this paper we introduce the first scalable end-to-end approach to learning approximate Nash equilibria without prior domain knowledge. Our method combines fictitious self-play with deep reinforcement learning. When applied to Leduc poker, Neural Fictitious Self-Play (NFSP) approached a Nash equilibrium, whereas common reinforcement learning methods diverged. In Limit Texas Holdem, a poker game of real-world scale, NFSP learnt a strategy that approached the performance of state-of-the-art, superhuman algorithms based on significant domain expertise.

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3 selected excerpts · 3 total mentions

thomasahle
Neutral mention · rule
I'm more surprised David Silver isn't on it, since his background is in imperfect information games, with papers such as https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01121 He did multiple poker papers before he was the main author of Alpha Zero.
sanxiyn
Neutral mention · rule
I would consider a successful application of AlphaZero algorithm to imperfect information games to be a separate achievement, not a done deal. David Silver himself, who led AlphaGo project, wrote in 2016 in "Deep Reinforcement Learning from Self-Play in Imperfect-Information Games" https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01121 "While many machine learning methods have achieved near-optimal solutions to classical, perfect-information games, these methods fail to converge in imperfect-information games".
nl
Neutral mention · rule
That paper doesn't mention game theory or the Nash equilibrium at all. Perhaps you mean [2], which does. However, the article seems to misinterpret this: the fact that that system approximates the Nash equilibrium should be expected. Any system (including humans) that performs well in those types of games will, almost by definition. [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.01121.pdf

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