Automated Negotiations for General Game Playing

In this paper we present a new algorithm for negotiations in non-zero-sum games. Although games have been studied extensively, most game playing algorithms have been developed under the assumption that players do not communicate. Many real-world problems, however, can be modeled as non-zero-sum games in which players may mutually benefit if they coordinate their actions, which requires negotiation. The field of Automated Negotiations is another important topic in AI, but in this field one usually assumes that utility functions have explicit expressions and can therefore be calculated easily. Traditional approaches do not apply to domains in which the utility values are instead determined by the rules of a complex game. In this paper we aim to bridge the gap between General Game Playing and Automated Negotiations. Our algorithm is an adaptation of Monte Carlo Tree Search that allows players to negotiate. It is completely domain-independent in the sense that it is not tailored to any specific game. It can be applied to any non-zero-sum game, provided that its rules are described in Game Description Language.