The robot mafia: A test environment for deceptive robots

Abstract

Future robotic agents may be required to reason about a given situation and decide whether it is appropriate to lie to or deceive humans. One type of deception, known formally as strategic deception, is the act of influencing others toward a specific goal through non-truths. To demonstrate and test for the kind of reasoning required in strategic deception, we use a modified form of the social strategy game "Mafia" as a testing ground. In the game, the townsfolk, who can be seen as an uninformed majority, must determine who amongst themselves are members of the informed minority (the Mafia) via social cues before the Mafia eliminate all the townsfolk. First, we talk about how strategic deception applies to Mafia. We then present simplified rules for the game which can be formalized into a logic-based language. Once formalized, the rules can be provided to an automated theorem prover, which can carry out the necessary reasoning. By using this automated theorem prover we discuss how one can demonstrate automated strategic deception.