Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

deepmind.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 344 posts

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#81

Post by tedajax »

doikor wrote: post #42
formula1 wrote: post #15

I suspect this will eventually lead to AI as a service for games. Rather than build a terrible AI that delays a game by months, approaching a company that can build a decent AI initially which gets better overtime would probably be ideal and create better experiences. Im curious if a startup can be built from this.

Is it harder to make an AI that is mediocre at playing the game vs one that is good? That is the main issue with making good AIs for games now. We want AIs (if you can call them that) that play kinda like humans but worse then the player as the player wants to win. Making an AI for game isn't about making a good AI. It is about making an AI that loses in a convincing manner. This is especially try for games like Star…

To some extent it depends on the game.

First person shooters can have super accurate AIs that are really frustrating to play against. Try beating the last "boss" in quake 3 on nightmare difficulty. A game like Starcraft relies much more on decision making that raw 3d math calculations and that makes making a decent AI pretty difficult without giving it advantages like extra resources or vision. That said, even though a game like Quake is easier to write an AI for, top players can still be top level AIs with superior reasoning about using the map and timing power up spawns and such.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#82

Post by wlesieutre »

placeybordeaux wrote: post #66
DontGiveTwoFlux wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a Starcraft brood war AI competition that did not have a limit on APM. The top contestants were employing strategies that required APM an order of magnitude higher than what players could do. For example, in brood war, SCVs can repair any Terran building or vehicle but it is not worth the effort to repair goliaths or tanks for a player. However, the AI could easily manage repairing it's tanks which makes th…

This was an example of extreme micro that a very simple AI can do that changes the game entirely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs

How does it seem to know which zergling is about to get hit?

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#84

Post by thedangler »

formula1 wrote: post #15

I suspect this will eventually lead to AI as a service for games. Rather than build a terrible AI that delays a game by months, approaching a company that can build a decent AI initially which gets better overtime would probably be ideal and create better experiences. Im curious if a startup can be built from this.

I thought a neat way to make NPCs less dumb in games would be to let other players (internet connection required) to be the NPCs. They would have limited coverage area maybe set tasks and restrictions and let them fight a real person to move onto the next part of the game.

Basically set up a queue of player and what NPC character to play and when a user gets to that part of the game where NPC needs to load, you jump in and play. When the NPC dies you the game (scene) and get put back in the queue of playable NPCs.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#85

Post by jandrese »

doikor wrote: post #42
formula1 wrote: post #15

I suspect this will eventually lead to AI as a service for games. Rather than build a terrible AI that delays a game by months, approaching a company that can build a decent AI initially which gets better overtime would probably be ideal and create better experiences. Im curious if a startup can be built from this.

Is it harder to make an AI that is mediocre at playing the game vs one that is good? That is the main issue with making good AIs for games now. We want AIs (if you can call them that) that play kinda like humans but worse then the player as the player wants to win. Making an AI for game isn't about making a good AI. It is about making an AI that loses in a convincing manner. This is especially try for games like Star…

It depends. AIs can do some things much better than nearly all humans. Twiddly little micromanagement for example. Total Annihilation (and it's successors like Supreme Commander) do this. The AI will send out a constant stream of micromanaged harassers constantly order to annoy the human opponent to death.

Where the AIs tend to be very bad is in long term thinking and overall strategy.

Blizzard's AI in Starcraft generally plays like a slightly more aggressive but novice human. It's more fun than the TA AI, but not terribly strong once you understand the game mechanics.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#86

Post by bluebeard »

This will be good for games moving forward due to the meta changing for players as the AI adapts to their tactics and vice versa. Lessons learned from this can then be applied to other areas. And as an added bonus it creates more interest in AI research.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#87

Post by acomar »

wlesieutre wrote: post #82
placeybordeaux wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was an example of extreme micro that a very simple AI can do that changes the game entirely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs

How does it seem to know which zergling is about to get hit?

If you slow it down, it would be apparent to you too. High-level human players do this kind of thing to, just not this fast. But effectively, it's watching where the attacking unit is facing and it knows when the next attack is coming, so it knows what the viable targets are and can react when it becomes obvious.

(it's also possible the system is receiving information directly from the game engine, but it's definitely possible to figure this out from nothing but the information on screen)

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#88

Post by caylus »

wlesieutre wrote: post #82
placeybordeaux wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was an example of extreme micro that a very simple AI can do that changes the game entirely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs

How does it seem to know which zergling is about to get hit?

Because the tanks are using the default unit AI, which AFAIK amounts to "when your weapon is ready to fire, shoot the closest enemy in range". The zergling AI knows the attack range and rate of each tank so can ensure that the closest zergling is always on its own when a tank is ready to fire.

What would be really interesting is putting a similar smart AI on the tanks, which could make decisions like shooting at the highest concentration of zerglings instead of the closest one, or holding its fire if one lone zergling is in range, but a clump of them is about to enter range.

Human players already do both optimizations with widow mines, which are a unit that takes several seconds to prepare its shot so it's feasible to retarget. It's not feasible for humans to do this with tanks though as they fire immediately and automatically.

You could even see counterevolution as two AI algorithms become better at predicting what the other will do.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#89

Post by ssalazar »

spacehacker wrote: post #62
stale2002 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Starcraft isn't troops on the battlefield, in the same way that Risk, the boardgame isn't troops on the battlefield. Just because the 1s and 0s or game pieces represent "troops" to humans, doesn't mean that the underlying game mechanics have anything at all to do with a real war. For all we know, the problems solved by a monopoly AI, are more applicable to a real war than those solved by a Risk or starcraft AI.

You must admit that there is an underlying aggressive theme in games like StarCraft. The visuals show clear resemblance of people being killed by projectiles and by other war technology. The AI will be rewarded for skillfully decimating the enemy, for protecting the units it has control over and for coming up with strategies like ambush, raids, patrolling etc. I am more convinced by the idea that an AI will be able g…

> You must admit that there is an underlying aggressive theme in these games. The visuals show clear resemblance of people being killed by projectiles and by other war technology.

An AI doesn't know or care about any of this. Literally its applying statistics to optimize a cost function or assign labels to input states. These numbers could represent number of kills or number of dollars; the computer doesn't care.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#90

Post by tdaltonc »

I'd love to see a e-sport league where the teams are AI human hybrids (Centaur teams). We know that AI human hybrid teams are great at chess [1], and I'd love to see rts games played by 'Centaur' teams. In the same way the innovations made in F1 often trickle down to consumer cars, can you imagine the advances that could be made in human-machine interactions in the crucible of a real-time Centaur gaming league?

[1] http://bloomreach.com/2014/12/centaur-chess-brings-best-huma...

Post reply on HN