Programming backgammon using self-teaching neural nets forex

The Applicability of Self-Play Algorithms to Trading and Forecasting Financial Markets When contemplating the conceptual transfer of self-play algorithms to their applications in financial markets, we are immediately confronted with two fundamental challenges: i The information space based on which decisions are made is unbounded and, to some extent, unknown.

Before addressing these challenges in detail, let us first look at why self-playing AI agents are still a viable candidate for financial decision-making tasks as well. AI methods employing self-play algorithms have recently been very successful in mastering a number of challenges difficult to overcome by conventional machine learning approaches, i.

Self-play algorithms have a long history in playing traditional games, such as chess, checkers, backgammon, and Go Samuel, ; Tesauro, ; Silver et al. Even though the program was unable to outplay checker masters, its playing ability has been relatively high, compared with other existing approaches.

Another example comes from Tesauro who designed a neural network to play backgammon based entirely on the self-play board configuration. It is also worth noting that the backgammon game also comprises an element of randomness induced by the dice role in the play. Silver et al. However, it is essential to note that for successfully playing Starcraft II, in addition to fast information processing and computation of complex decision trees, qualities like mid- to long-term strategic planning, creativity, dealing with ambiguousness, and capability to adapt one's behaviour to a changing environment, are necessary—qualities so far only attributed to human players.

Nevertheless, it seems possible to teach and to breed AI agents, that can accomplish quite remarkable feats—at least in the predefined and bounded environment of a game. Let us now turn our attention to financial markets. Badea is one of the very first, successful attempts to apply the Inductive Logic Programming ILP for combinations of well-known technical indicators based on historical trading data.

The author identifies the ideal trading opportunities and feeds them to the ILP learner, which consequently produces trading strategies with clearly identifiable rules, as an output. Halperin and Feldshteyn propose a completely new method for signals, based on the self-learning approach, which could be considered an extension of the well-known Black-Litterman model, that remains one of the most important approaches in portfolio management because of its simplicity and strict focus on market dynamics.

Nowadays, there exist a few promising attempts to apply the self-play algorithms to trading. In , Edward Lu developed a deep reinforcement learning model Q-Trader. However, in terms of long-term decision making, it was not as suitable as when applied to shorter periods.

The Q-Trader uses an exciting concept called experience replay, which is very similar to the AlphaGo strategy developed by DeepMind. Furthermore, the academic literature offers another exciting attempt to apply the AlphaGo strategy to financial markets, 2 in particular to stock trading and to asset pricing, i. Although this research is still in early stages and there are numerous open questions, considering its past successful performance AlphaGo possesses the highest possible Go ranking , it is without a doubt that trading strategies based on techniques similar to those used in AlphaGo, have the potential to significantly impact financial markets and optimal trading strategies.

The proposed trading system would require a deep neural network specification. It is crucial to note that the majority of current approaches focus exclusively on stock markets. Other markets such as FX, commodities and bond markets seem to be significantly unresearched, offering ample space for further research and analysis. The stock market prediction indeed has solid fundamentals, meaning numerous prediction models are giving interesting starting points. Furthermore, FX and commodity markets are frequently considered as drivers of the global economy and international trade.

The prices of strategic commodities such as oil, metals, and gas have a massive impact on economies in terms of inflation, government spending or foreign direct investments. The strength or weakness of major currencies significantly affects international trade. Hence, investigating what drives the global economy seems to be imminent in such an analysis. However, the successful application of self-play algorithms to all asset classes will be a remarkable achievement that might completely transform the current state of trading.

Furthermore, multi-agent RL can help to model decisions made under the theoretic framework of game theory and hence make the process understandable, transparent, and explainable. Major Challenges in the Application of Self-Play Algorithms We group the major challenges into three main categories: i data challenges ii challenge of players and iii modelling and simulation issues. We provide an overview of existing solutions to those three topics. Data Challenges The academic research has somehow stayed away from financial markets due to numerous reasons.

On the one hand, the availability and selection of data constitute a substantial challenge. On the other hand, financial markets are inherently chaotic and frequently considered as unpredictable, hence efficient Mussa, ; Meese and Rogoff, ; Lipton-Lifschitz, Indeed, financial markets are typically determined by a substantial number of time-dependent processes and factors, which are also non-stationary.

Hence, building an adequate prediction model capable of simultaneously capturing all factors, processes and the evolution of markets is often not possible. This task becomes further burdened by the rapid changes that characterise financial markets. It is worth noting that the high complexity of financial markets and a large number of potential industry drivers might lead to model selection and over-fitting issues.

On the other hand, the availability of historical data also remains a significant challenge. The financial markets change even on micro- to milliseconds time scales, and many macroeconomic factors are available only on weekly, monthly or in some cases on a quarterly frequency. For instance, nowadays, in many cases, it seems that stock prices are more influenced by the unavoidable daily noise included in media coverage than by the companies' actual performance and thus the separation of the signal from the noise is one of the major challenges when dealing with financial data.

Furthermore, the risk of not having sufficiently large data sets for training AI models remains relatively high. Therefore, to train models, it might be necessary to generate more data by doing simulations. Three established practises of achieving this objective are: i employing stochastic processes Janke, , ii constituting the market through players that by themselves create more data and iii applying generative models such as GANs Alqahtani et al. Even in the above-mentioned restricted setting of, say, a momentum trader, this remains an arduous task.

In the first instance a stochastic process , we need to make sure that the statistical properties of the simulated data are aligned with the historical data and consistent across the market at each point in time. In the second players simulate their own market and third generative models instance, the same holds true.

Challenges Related to the Number of Participants Here we discuss and analyse the challenges related to the particular situation in financial markets, where we either have only one player or a myriad thereof. When thinking about this second challenge, it might make sense to employ an analogy to Statistical Thermodynamics and its origins.

Starting from a free-moving one single particle, we can efficiently compute its trajectory. Furthermore, we know that as long as no force is acting on it, it will not change its state of motion. This is a rather dull situation, akin to one single trader: he cannot trade, no matter how many tradeable assets he has at his disposal, simply because there is no one to trade with.

Let us add another particle: Now, we can still compute the trajectories of both particles and even their interactions. Analogous, our two traders can interact and trade. However, the results will be quite boring in the case of particles and probably either non-existent or very strange in the case of two traders. Only when we add more and more particles, things become interesting: Now, it is no longer of any use describing the trajectories of all the single particles, but a different behaviour emerges that we can capture at a higher level via the associated statistics of the integrated aggregate.

As long as the single player does not in any noticeable way influence and move the market, this leaves us with the following interesting conclusions: i When training a single AI agent against the market, it should make no conceptual difference whether this market is based on real historical data or simulated data, be it via stochastic processes or a multi-trader ecosystem: The AI agent will experience an infinitely deep market that dictates its trading environment.

This approach could prove very efficient concerning strategy formation and trading optimisation. The model for AMPs would then calibrate to multivariate data and collective past behaviour. By this, the AMPs would function as external market boundary conditions with regard to the other smaller AI agents. A model structured like this could be useful to forecast any political or market reactions to unilateral actions, e.

These risk management systems are prevalent both in banks in the form of conditional value-at-risk and at investment funds in the form of target volatility concepts Jaeger et al. Or conversely, can a market be simulated at all when only price data is available to the agents?

The simulation of a market based on the actions of many single AI agents also has exciting implications with regard to understanding market dynamics and could potentially deliver insight far beyond robust forecasting and optimal trading strategies. On the other hand, hybrid approaches may offer a way to reduce complexity. As an example, we can think about providing some market parameters e. Finally, a selection of rule-based trading styles as agents that generate not only signals but also forecasts of global asset flows stemming from these trading styles might yield additional insights into overall market behaviour.

No matter which approach we choose, we need to infer rules and algorithms sensibly describing the market. This is already very complex if we only look at price data and becomes probably unmanageable once we decide to include additional information, like macro data or news flow. As a side note, we remark that even when just referring to historical data, providing information beyond prices becomes a challenge.

For each point in time, we would have to constitute the full set of data available just then—a virtually impossible task: consider the case of including news flows. The literature offers several works that have employed multi-agent modelling and simulation, including Ehrentreich , Kumar et al.

The most recent attempt to a multi-agent simulation of the stock market is proposed by Souissi et al. Namely, the authors simulate a simplified stock exchange with three types of investors zero intelligent trader, fundamentalist trader and traders using historical information in the decision-making process and one type of asset, to analyse the evolution of traded volume on exchanges depending on the type of investor.

Similarly, as in most available research, the three agents in Souissi et al. The results indicate that financial markets' stability and performance is strongly impacted by the distribution of the types of traders and the introduction of imitation mechanisms. The latest version of the program, version 2. According to an article by Bill Robertie published in Inside Backgammon magazine Robertie, , TD-Gammon s level of play is significantly better than any previous computer program.

Robertie estimates that TD-Gammon 1. This is consistent with the results of the game sample. This would be about equivalent to a decent advanced level of human play in local and regional Open-division tournaments. In contrast, most commercial programs play at a weak intermediate level that loses well over one point per game against world-class humans. The best previous conmlercial program scored points per game on this scale. The best previous program of any sort was Hans Berliner s BKG program, which in its only public appearance in won a short match against the World Champion at that time Berliner, BKG was about equivalent to a very strong intermediate or weak advanced player and would have scored in the range of Based on the latest game sample, Robertie s overall assessment is that TD-Gammon 2.

In fact, due to the program s steadiness it never gets tired or careless, as even the best of humans inevitably do , he thinks it would actually be the favorite against any human player in a long money-game session or in a grueling tournament format such as the World Cup competition. The only thing which prevents TD-Gammon from genuinely equaling world-class human play is that it still makes minor, practically inconsequen- 21 4 tial technical errors in its endgame play.

One would expect these technical errors to cost the program on the order of. Robertie thinks that there are probably only two or three dozen players in the entire world who, at the top of their game, could expect to hold their own or have an advantage over the program.

This means that TD- Ga:mnon is now probably as good at backgammon as the grandmaster chess machine Deep Thought is at chess. Interestingly enough, it is only in the last years that human play has gotten good enough to rival TD-Gammon s current playing ability. If TD-Gammon had been developed 10 years ago, Robertie says, it would have easily been the best player in the world at that time.

Even 5 years ago, there would have been only two or three players who could equal it. The self-teaching reinforcement learning approach used in the developmeat of TD-Gammon has greatly surpassed the supervised learning approach of Neurogammon, and has achieved a level of play considerably beyond any possible prior expectations.

It has also demonstrated favorable empirical behavior of TD A , such as good scaling behavior, despite the lack of theoretical guarantees. Prospects for further improvement of TD-Gammon seem promising. Based on the observed scaling, training larger and larger networks with correspondingly more experience would probably result in even higher levels of performance.

Additional improvements could come from modifications of the training procedure or the input representation scheme. Some combination of these factors could easily result in a version of TD-Galmnon that would be the uncontested world s best backgalmnon player.

However, instead of merely pushing TD-Gammon to higher and higher levels of play, it now seems more worthwhile to extract the principles underlying the success of this application of TD learning, and to determine what kinds of other applications may Mso produce similar successes. Other possible applications might include financial trading strategies, military battlefield strategies, and control tasks such as robot motor control, navigation and path planning.

At this point we are still largely ignorant as to why TD-Gammon is able to learn so well. One plausible conjecture is that the stochastic nature of the task is criticm to the success of TD learning. One possibly very important effect of the stochastic dice rolls in backgaimnon is that during learning, they enforce a certain minimum amount of exploration of the state space. By stochastically forcing the system into regions of state space that the current evaluation flmction tries to avoid, it is possible that improved evaluations and new strategies can be discovered.

Berliner, "Computer backgammon. Robertie, "Carbon versus silicon: matching wits with TD-Gammon. Sutton, "Learning to predict by the methods of temporal differences. Tesauro, "Neurogammon wins Computer Olympiad. Tesauro, "Practical issues in temporal difference learning.

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Neurogammon appears to play backgammon at a substantially higher level than conventional programs. Palamedes is an ongoing work aimed at developing intelligent bots to play a variety of popular backgammon variants. Currently, the Greek variants Portes, Plakoto and Fevga are supported. A different neural network has been designed, trained and evaluated for each one of these variants.

Apart from standard backgammon, several yet unexplored variants of the game exist, which use the same board, number of checkers, and dice but may have different rules for moving the checkers, starting positions and movement direction.

Backgammon is a good test of principles of artificial intelligence. BKG 9. Originally published in Scientific American. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto The online version of a book published in by MIT Press. It covers learning techniques which can be applied to backgammon programs. One section describes Tesauro's TD-Gammon program. Previous papers on TD-Gammon have focused on developing a scientific understanding of its reinforcement learning methodology.

From Artificial Intelligence journal, TD-Gammon is a neural network that is able to teach itself to play backgammon solely by playing against itself and learning from the results. Despite starting from random initial weights and hence random initial strategy , TD-Gammon achieves a surprisingly strong level of play.

This paper is a predecessor to Tesauro's TD-Gammon article. It examines whether Sutton's TD lambda algorithm can be used to train a neural network to play backgammon. Tesauro found that with zero built-in knowledge a TD lambda trained network is able to learn to play the entire game of backgammon at a fairly strong intermediate level.

This article was originally published in Machine Learning journal. Neurogammon 1. The networks were trained by back-propagation on large expert data sets. Neurogammon appears to play backgammon at a substantially higher level than conventional programs. Sejnowski A class of connectionist networks is described that has learned to play backgammon at an intermediate-to-advanced level.

The networks were trained by back-propagation learning on a large set of sample positions evaluated by a human expert. Motif is a Java Applet that you can play against on the internet. Here are some notes on how Motif chooses the moves it makes and how it learned to play.

An overview the genetic algorithms used in Bob's Backgammon, and how they evolved through natural selection to improve over many generations in competition with other algorithms.

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