nFlip : Deep Reinforcement Learning in Multiplayer FlipIt

Reinforcement learning has shown much success in games such as chess, backgammon and Go. However, in most of these games, agents have full knowledge of the environment at all times. We describe a deep learning model that successfully maximizes its score using reinforcement learning in a game with incomplete and imperfect information. We apply our model to FlipIt ¹, a two-player game in which both players, the attacker and the defender, compete for ownership of a shared resource and only receive information on the current state upon making a move. Our model is a deep neural network combined with Q-learning and is trained to maximize the defender’s time of ownership of the resource. We extend FlipIt to a larger action-spaced game with the introduction of a new lower-cost move and generalize the model to multiplayer FlipIt.