HUMIES 2016 ENTRY ================= # 1. The complete title of one (or more) paper(s) published in the open literature describing the work that the author claims describes a human-competitive result; Exploiting Evolutionary Modeling to Prevail in Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments # 2. The name, complete physical mailing address, e-mail address, and phone number of EACH author of EACH paper(s); ## Marco Gaudesi e mail: marco.gaudesi@gmail.com smail: via Goffredo Casalis, 8 / 10143 Torino / ITALY tel: +39-3336556217 ## Elio Piccolo email: elio.piccolo@polito.it smail: Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN / Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24 / 10123 Torino / ITALY tel: +39-0110907002 ## Giovanni Squillero email: giovanni.squillero@polito.it smail: Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN / Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24 / 10123 Torino / ITALY tel: +39-0110907091 ## Alberto Tonda email: alberto.tonda@grignon.inra.fr smail: UMR 782 GMPA, INRA / 1 av. Lucien Brétignières / 78850 Thiverval-Grignon / FRANCE tel: +33-130814596 # 3. The name of the corresponding author (i.e., the author to whom notices will be sent concerning the competition); Giovanni Squillero # 4. The abstract of the paper(s); The iterated prisoner’s dilemma is a famous model of cooperation and conflict in game theory. Its origin can be traced back to the Cold War, and countless strategies for playing it have been proposed so far, either designed by hand or automatically generated by computers. In the 2000s, scholars started focusing on adaptive players, that is, able to classify their opponent’s behavior and adopt an effective counter-strategy. The player presented in this paper, pushes such idea even further: it builds a model of the current adversary from scratch, without relying on any predefined archetypes, and tweaks it as the game develops using an evolutionary algorithm; at the same time, it exploits the model to lead the game into the most favorable continuation. Models are compact non-deterministic finite state machines; they are extremely efficient in predicting opponents’ replies, without being completely correct by necessity. Experimental results show that such player is able to win several one-to-one games against strong opponents taken from the literature, and that it consistently prevails in round-robin tournaments of different sizes. # 5. A list containing one or more of the eight letters (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, or H) that correspond to the criteria (see above) that the author claims that the work satisfies; (E) The result is equal to or better than the most recent human-created solution to a long-standing problem for which there has been a succession of increasingly better human-created solutions. (G) The result solves a problem of indisputable difficulty in its field. (H) The result holds its own or wins a regulated competition involving human contestants (in the form of either live human players or human-written computer programs). # 6. A statement stating why the result satisfies the criteria that the contestant claims (see examples of statements of human-competitiveness as a guide to aid in constructing this part of the submission); (E) The literature about the "Iterated Prisoner Dilemma" is impressive, and new contributions appear regularly. Tages is definitely "more adaptive" and far more effective that the best human-designed adaptive players designed for competitions. (G) The impressive amount of research devoted to the topic between the 1980s and the 2010s suggests that the problem is interesting, important, difficult, and still "unsolved" (indeed, finding an absolute "best player" may not be theoretically possible). (H) Experimental results presented in the paper clearly demonstrate that Tages is able to outperform all human-design strategies in tournament of different sizes. # 7. A full citation of the paper (that is, author names; publication date; name of journal, conference, technical report, thesis, book, or book chapter; name of editors, if applicable, of the journal or edited book; publisher name; publisher city; page numbers, if applicable); @article{Tages2015, doi = {10.1109/tciaig.2015.2439061}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCIAIG.2015.2439061}, year = {2015}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical {\&} Electronics Engineers ({IEEE})}, pages = {1--1}, author = {Marco Gaudesi and Elio Piccolo and Giovanni Squillero and Alberto Tonda}, title = {Exploiting Evolutionary Modeling to Prevail in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Tournaments}, journal = {{IEEE} Transactions on Computational Intelligence and {AI} in Games} } DOI: 10.1109/TCIAIG.2015.2439061 SOURCE CODE: https://bitbucket.org/squillero/tages # 8. A statement either that "any prize money, if any, is to be divided equally among the co-authors" OR a specific percentage breakdown as to how the prize money, if any, is to be divided among the co-authors; Any prize money, if any, is to be divided equally among the co-authors (if more convenient, the whole sum may also be given to a single author who will take care of redistributing it). # 9. A statement stating why the authors expect that their entry would be the "best" The Prisoner's Dilemma is a classical problem in game theory. Since the days of the first tournament held by Axelrod in 1979, the winning algorithms were all carefully devised by humans. Tages, the proposed player, is the first non-human player able to consistently prevail in tournaments. It pushes the idea of "adaptive player" one step further: thanks to an Evolutionary Algorithm, it is able to model the opponent's strategy as the game develops, and, at the same time, exploit such model to drive the game into a favorable line of exchanges. # 10. An indication of the general type of genetic or evolutionary computation used, such as GA (genetic algorithms), GP (genetic programming), ES (evolution strategies), EP (evolutionary programming), LCS (learning classifier systems), GE (grammatical evolution), GEP (gene expression programming), DE (differential evolution), etc. Tages' evolutionary core has been written from scratch. It may be loosely defined a GA whose genomes encode non-deterministic finite state machines, and in its design it is possible to recognize a debt toward the pioneering works of Lawrence Fogel.