Entropy Machines: On Battle Platform Antilles
Alexander B. Joy, Guest Contributor
Six years ago, Google unleashed its AlphaGo AI, a machine intelligence designed to play Go. Unlike Chess, where robotic victories over human grandmasters have been well-documented, Go had been considered a game so complex no program could ever hope to solve it. Until AlphaGo. Over the course of five games, AlphaGo defeated 18-time world champion Lee Sedol four games to one.
(Image found here.)
In the first game, AlphaGo abandoned a contestable area of the board to attack a segment that Lee appeared to have well in-hand; twenty turns later, its unusual choice set off a cascade that let the AI capture half of Lee’s territory. AlphaGo seemed to ignore a dangerous Lee attack in Game 2, only to reinforce in a way that left Lee stranded. What looked like a successful Lee incursion in Game 3 resulted in a lethal AlphaGo countermeasure that permanently barred Lee from a huge chunk of the board. Lee took Game 4 after deliberately attempting unorthodox moves that stumped AlphaGo’s programming, but Game 5 went to AlphaGo when it executed a surprising strategy to recover from an early error.
AlphaGo’s victory was remarkable in itself. But even more striking were the methods by which it attained victory. AlphaGo used opaque strategies and played unorthodox moves that could have been mistaken for glitches or reasoning errors. Only in the endgame did their value become apparent. Some commentators described AlphaGo’s moves as “outlandish, brilliant, creative, foolish, and even beautiful.” Western master Michael Redmond suggested there was something alien about AlphaGo’s methods, noting that “There’s some inhuman element in the way AlphaGo plays.” And Mok Jin-seok, director of the South Korean national Go team, described his own bouts with AlphaGo in similar terms: “At first, it was hard to understand and I almost felt like I was playing against an alien.”
(Image found here.)
The language here is telling. Dueling with AlphaGo isn’t like battling an impossibly skilled human player (or a really fast alarm clock, as Garry Kasparov disparagingly dubs the victorious Chess AI Deep Blue). Humans and alarm clocks are familiar. People we more or less understand after a lifetime of experience among them; alarm clocks can be reduced to mechanisms, and understood piece by piece. Complex though they are, we can rationalize both watch and watchmaker. Yet AlphaGo and its simultaneously random and precise play fit within neither human nor mechanical paradigms. Operating by a logic that resists categorization and comprehension, it can only be called “alien.”
One of the lessons of AlphaGo, then, is what our adherence to patterns reveals about how we relate to the rest of the world. If human beings are creatures of pattern, as capable of reading the stars as finding faces in cinnamon buns, then what’s truly alien to us is what resists pattern. A logic too complicated for us to detect becomes indistinguishable from randomness. Both appear as the absence of pattern. Both feel inhuman. Both feel alien.
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It is this principle that makes the core conceits of the print-and-play solitaire wargame Battle Platform Antilles (Dan Verssen, 2000) so clever. In Battle Platform Antilles, you confront a pattern-resistant AI whose choices follow no discernible order. (Like the observers of AlphaGo, the instruction manual notes that the seemingly erratic opponent in Battle Platform Antilles might be following “some unknown alien battle tactic.”) Herein lies the beauty of the game. (A beauty that moved me to make a Tabletop Simulator mod for it.) The AIs of some solo wargames strive to mimic a human player, and end up weak or predictable – like facing off against a slow alarm clock or an unimaginative person. Yet a duel against the enemy in Battle Platform Antilles, with its volatility and randomness, feels like an encounter with something alien.
In Battle Platform Antilles, players lead a squadron of seven fighter spacecraft (called “Paladins”) into battle against a hostile AI-driven orbital platform (the “Antilles”), a relic of an extinct alien race that’s been left to defend an abandoned planet humanity seeks to colonize. Over the course of nine turns, players attempt to maneuver their Paladins through the Antilles’s barrage of projectile weapons ( “Bolts”) and inflict enough damage on the platform to subdue it. The more quickly you down the Antilles, and the fewer casualties you sustain, the higher your final score – and the more favorable the ranking that your score nets.
The Antilles has three different Bolts at its disposal: a generic “Normal Bolt,” a speedy “Fast Bolt” that moves twice as far as the others, and a devastating “Explosive Bolt” that detonates the moment it nears a Paladin. The movement of each Bolt on a given turn is dictated by the roll of a twenty-sided die (d20). Each roll corresponds to a “Path” on the game’s movement chart, which the individual Bolt then traces. Any Paladin in its way is destroyed.
To evade the oncoming Bolts and position for an optimal attack, Paladins move by “blipping.” This means they teleport immediately from their current hex on the board to another unoccupied hex. Paladins that do not move on their turn receive a bonus to their attack rolls against the Antilles. Paladins also hit harder the closer they are to their target – though they assume a greater risk of being shot down.
The game proceeds at a brisk clip. Each turn, the Antilles fires a bunch of Bolts; the Bolts race about the board, wiping out Paladins or other Bolts; the player’s surviving ships move to safety, or chance sitting still for a more decisive blow; the player attacks the Antilles or Bolts. Then the cycle repeats. The exchange continues until the game’s timer hits zero, the Antilles falls, or all the player’s Paladins break.
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Unlike other wargames, entropy is the primary weapon both sides wield in Battle Platform Antilles. You and the Antilles each introduce randomness and disorder to the board in an effort to arrange it more favorably for your purposes. You both have an ideal board, but both of you are equipped with the means to sabotage – if not upend – a setup that suits your opponent.
For the Antilles, each Bolt can only cover up to four hexes at a time (or eight, with the Fast Bolt). Yet, given the possibility that they could pass through any hex within their range, you have to consider all of those hexes fatal if you wish to preserve all of your Paladins. It’s as if your ships are in a Schrödinger state as long as they occupy a reachable hex: they are both alive and dead until the decisive d20 roll. If territory control is one of the major goals of a wargame, the Antilles claims board segments through the dissuasive power of uncertainty. In other words, it controls territory not by rendering it impassable, but by making it too risky for you to linger there for long. If the Antilles can stall you long enough to run out the game’s timer, it wins.
But you, too, enjoy uncertainty’s benefits. Each Paladin is the ultimate moving target. Under most circumstances, you cannot be contained. You can only be inhibited – forced to vacate advantageous spots, perhaps, or have clean shots blocked by Bolt movement. Bolts may travel the board at great speeds, but safety is only a blip away. So too is any flank your enemy exposes. You can be anywhere; only turn order and the game’s nine-turn time limit prevent you from being everywhere. There is a measure of fairness to this. If time works in the Antilles’s favor, space works in yours.
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At bottom, however, Battle Platform Antilles is not about raw entropy. It’s about whether patterns can be imposed on situations where none seem to prevail.
The Antilles wants a board without order. Its ideal setup is one where Bolts endanger (or could endanger) so many hexes that the Paladins cannot attack it safely, and do not have enough time to reposition and regroup. This is perhaps the finest representation of the triumph of an alien intelligence: what looks like dissonance and disorder reveals itself as an endgame where no viable countermove is possible.
But your mission demands that you pull some kind of order from that chaos. The Antilles must be defeated, and that means you must find or create pockets of predictability where some kind of strategy – the pattern of moves that inch toward victory – can be executed. Is there an oasis of safety from which your ships can fire? Can it be made if you shoot down a Bolt or two? Does that leave you enough firepower to dismantle the Antilles within the time limit? How many moves ahead does it let you plan? Will it be enough…?
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The core strength of Battle Platform Antilles, then, is how effectively it splits the goals of two forces armed with similar abilities. The Antilles is an entropic force tending toward still greater disarray. You are a force of entropy that, somehow, must advance toward order. The game stages a zero-sum tug-of-war between strategies that, by design, trend in opposite directions.
To play Battle Platform Antilles is to pit your most human impulses – pattern recognition, prediction, risk aversion – against an enemy who neither thinks like you nor benefits from thinking like you. It’s asymmetry with a purpose. The Antilles doesn’t simply have a goal and strategy antithetical to yours, but an entire way of being that stands in opposition to your own. You are fighting the alien – not the humanoid, but the truly inhuman: that which is utterly incommensurate with us.
In a game with space colonization as its backdrop, this is a thematic masterstroke. The human must take on the inhuman. The uncomfortable question Battle Platform Antilles poses, however, is whether the human can prevail.
