This week, Team Tactica began its final preparations for our upcoming Final Design Review (FDR)! The Final Design Review is the biggest event for IPPD. We will be spending all day in the UF Reitz Union presenting our projects to our liaisons and to the public!
To prepare for FDR, we’ve been working on our presentation, giving special attention to our project results. Above is one of our results slides, showing the current win rates we have for our models. Note that we are still doing some testing, so these figures are only temporary.
As a reminder, our testing plan was to have our agent play against 3 random choice players (abbreviated as R), 3 Tactica value function players (TVP), and 3 AlphaBeta players (AB) in 1000 games each. Here, we only have some win rates for 100-game test runs. However, our model is performing quite well, reaching win rates above 25% for TVP and nearly 25% for AB.
Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that our win rates will reach our target win rate of 50% (at least right now), but we’ve been able to demonstrate how our ensemble approach to reinforcement learning can drastically improve our agents. We will be presenting these findings in our research paper. We’ll also be sure to make note of our limitations and next steps to hopefully help anyone who would like to expand upon our work!
Our FDR presentation was well received by our peers, but there are still some adjustments to be made, such as how we explain the game of Catan. We should make it clear that we could have picked any other strategy game; we went for Catan because it features randomness and mutually beneficial trades that make it much more challenging for machine learning.
Here’s another photo from Prototype Inspection Day:
Recently, our abstract from our research paper was accepted into the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), one of the biggest events in modeling, simulation, and training. We are excited about showing our work, and it would be amazing for our paper to be presented there!
Next week is our Final Design Review! There will be one more blog post where we’ll get to share all the details, including our poster and video! That’s all for now. See you next week!