CODE WORLD MODELS FOR GENERAL GAME PLAYING

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Overview

Paper Summary

Conflicts of Interest

Identified Weaknesses

Rating Explanation

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Paper Summary

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Google's AI teaches itself game rules by writing code, then beats Google's other AI, but Gin Rummy is a monster!

Researchers from Google DeepMind developed a method where large language models (LLMs) automatically convert game rules into executable Python code, enabling AI to play various games with greater strategic depth and verifiability. This "Code World Model" (CWM) approach significantly outperformed a direct LLM-as-policy approach (Gemini 2.5 Pro) in most games, though it struggled notably with the complex rules of Gin Rummy.

Possible Conflicts of Interest

All listed authors are affiliated with Google DeepMind. The paper's method (CWM-(IS)MCTS) is benchmarked against and shown to largely outperform Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is a large language model also developed and offered by Google. This constitutes a conflict of interest, as the authors' employer directly benefits from positive results comparing their new method to their existing LLM product.

Identified Weaknesses

Difficulty with Intricate Game Rules

The method struggled significantly with Gin Rummy, an imperfect information game with highly intricate, multi-step procedural subroutines. This indicates a limitation in reliably translating exceptionally complex natural language rules into flawless executable code, resulting in lower model accuracy for such games.

Reliance on LLM for Code Generation

The entire approach is fundamentally dependent on the LLM's ability to synthesize correct and verifiable Python code from natural language descriptions. While an iterative refinement process is employed, the initial quality of the generated code and the complexity of the game rules can pose a significant upstream challenge.

High Computational Cost for Refinement

Achieving high code accuracy, especially for more complex games like Gin Rummy, required a substantial number of LLM calls for iterative refinement (e.g., 500 calls). This can lead to significant computational expenses.

Limited Scope of Current Work

The current research focuses on two-player games and does not yet incorporate active/online learning of the world model or extend to open-world games with free-form text or visual interfaces. This limits its immediate applicability to more dynamic and less structured real-world scenarios.

Author-Created Novel Games

While the "out-of-distribution" games were created by the authors to avoid contamination from existing LLM training data, there is a potential for inadvertent alignment between these custom games and the LLM's internal representations, which might not fully reflect the challenges of truly novel, externally sourced OOD games.

Rating Explanation

The paper presents a novel and largely effective approach for AI to learn game rules and play by synthesizing code. It demonstrates strong performance against a leading LLM-as-policy baseline and addresses important aspects like verifiability and generalization. However, the significant struggle with Gin Rummy and the inherent conflict of interest related to Google's employees evaluating their own products prevents a perfect score.

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