DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by thomasahle » Fri, Nov 04, 2016, 10:18 PM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #136

andrew3726 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When Google’s AI can beat a human at StarCraft, it’s time to be very afraid. More like a time to be very excited! But I totally agree, long-term dependencies are an difficult problem. The DNC[0] by DeepMind is in my opinion a very important step in the correct direction to tackle this. [0] https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-neural-computers/

Honestly you can solve fog of war using regular computing (TM) to remember the last known state of a particular area, then feed that to the network along with information that A. it's an area as it was seen some time ago B. how much time elapsed since it was last uncovered. I can't imagine that this is where DNCs come in unless you want to needlessly complicate the matter (and create a network that is much more expen…

Yes, it's interesting what help will be given to the network.

From the article it seems the answer is: very little. It is allowed to use only the pixels on the screen. (During play, not training apparently.) It will even have to spend actions on moving the screen/window to inspect things. Very cool stuff :)

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

#172

Post by bradleyjg » Fri, Nov 04, 2016, 10:18 PM UTC

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #161

bradleyjg wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they allowed you to script micro unit behavior in some way that'd be first step in a hybrid game.

It would also be cool if it was an upgrade you unlock. So, instead of just stat upgrades, you could also purchase AI upgrades.

I'd rather that the coding was something that was left to the player or to the third party market. Right now programming games are kind of boring, more like a way of prettying up homework than anything else. A really fun game where programming could give you a competitive edge would be something to see.

The closest thing I can think of is add-ons for MMOs, but there the game developers specifically try to prevent add-ons that are too performance enhancing instead of making the coding an integral part of the game.

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

#173

Post by formula1 » Fri, Nov 04, 2016, 10:18 PM UTC

garrettgrimsley wrote: post #33

formula1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bans should never keep you back. A fake email is pennies to how much is gained from learning or building something incredible

A fake email won't help when you are banned by your unique ID that you paid, in the case of SC2: Legacy of the Void, at least $40 for.

Is $40 really not worth a year or more of experimentation? You can also do a lot of learning through replays or vs AI.

I personally am willing to pay $40 for an environment to test my ai on for a couple months.

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

#174

Post by make3 » Fri, Nov 04, 2016, 10:19 PM UTC

luka-birsa wrote: post #8

Anybody else sees a problem with training the AI to move troops around a battlefield, with the purpose to exterminate the opponent?

the press is going to make a huge clickbait deal about this, even if the complexity of starcraft 2, even if huge, is extremely small compared to the complexity of the world

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

#175

Post by kevinwang » Fri, Nov 04, 2016, 10:22 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #122

This is pretty interesting. DeepMind’s last triumph (beating the best human Go players with AlphaGo) is impressive, but Go is a great fit for neural networks as they stand today; it’s stateless, so you can fully evaluate your position based on the state of the board at a given turn. That’s not a good fit for most real-world problems, where you have to remember something that happened in the past. E.g. the ‘fog of war…

your last sentence, and this comment in general sounds exactly like what people were saying a year ago about Go. (Chess was easy, because it's perfectly suited for AI, but when a computer can beat us at Go, that's when we should be afraid!)

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

#176

Post by formula1 » Fri, Nov 04, 2016, 10:23 PM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #114

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've been to the Game Developer's Conference (once) before. Believe me, there have been startups that have provided A.I. services for years (it was kind of like the equivalent of the Havok engine for physics, you had to implement it into your game). I don't know how well used they are, but I remember them being mentioned at one of the lectures about A.I. that I attended. They had tables and swag, too. I don't remembe…

Thats really interesting. Im curious why they havent been more popular. Were they heavilly focused on fps's?

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

#177

Post by chrishare » Fri, Nov 04, 2016, 10:23 PM UTC

Very interesting stuff.

Allowing researchers to build AIs that operate on either game state or visual data is a great step, IMO. Being able to limit actions-per-minute is also very wise. The excellent BWAPI library for Starcraft Broodwar that is referenced (https://github.com/bwapi/bwapi) provides game state - and was presumably used by Facebook to do their research earlier this year (http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.02993). For mine, the significant new challenges here not present in Go are the partial observability of the game and the limited time window in which decisions need to be made. Even at 24 frames per second, the AI would only have 40 milliseconds to decide what to do in response to that frame. This is more relevant to online learning architectures.

The open questions here are how freely this will be available - and in what form. Will I need to buy a special version of the game? Clearly there will be some protection or AI detection - to ensure that competitive human play is not ruined either by human-level bots, if they can truly be developed, or by sub-par bots. Starcraft 2 (presumably the latest expansion, Legacy of the Void, will be used here) does not run on Linux, whereas most GPU-based deep learning toolkits are, so having a bridge between the game and AI server may be necessary for some researchers.

Besides being great for AI researchers, this is probably good for Blizzard too, since it will bring more interest to the Starcraft series.

2017 can't come soon enough.

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

#178

Post by samstave » Fri, Nov 04, 2016, 10:26 PM UTC

chrishare wrote: post #177

Very interesting stuff. Allowing researchers to build AIs that operate on either game state or visual data is a great step, IMO. Being able to limit actions-per-minute is also very wise. The excellent BWAPI library for Starcraft Broodwar that is referenced ( https://github.com/bwapi/bwapi ) provides game state - and was presumably used by Facebook to do their research earlier this year ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.029…

>2017 can't come soon enough.

Let's just get through Tuesday and see what happens! ;-)

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

#179

Post by softawre » Fri, Nov 04, 2016, 10:32 PM UTC

frostirosti wrote: post #141

arcticfox wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I think you'd have to limit that machine's APM to somewhere around the human limit, and make it choose which actions it wants to spend its time on. Otherwise the AI is eventually just going to absolutely destroy humans with micro, which is not remotely interesting. We've known transistors were faster than fingers for ages.

Could probably configure it/optimize it for different apms (10,100,300,inf) Could be interesting to see if it chooses different strategies based on that. What actions will optimize performance if I can only do 50 a minute

We've seen exactly this happen in competitive play. There was a player who would always play "Mech" Terran units, even though it wasn't the best strategy, because he had a lower APM than the Korean pros did.

And it worked for him, too.

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

#180

Post by samstave » Fri, Nov 04, 2016, 10:33 PM UTC

burke wrote: post #132

theptip wrote: post #122

This is pretty interesting. DeepMind’s last triumph (beating the best human Go players with AlphaGo) is impressive, but Go is a great fit for neural networks as they stand today; it’s stateless, so you can fully evaluate your position based on the state of the board at a given turn. That’s not a good fit for most real-world problems, where you have to remember something that happened in the past. E.g. the ‘fog of war…

> When Google’s AI can beat a human at StarCraft, it’s time to be very afraid. I don't actually agree with this. Unlike Go, StarCraft is not only a game of strategy; "micro" (micro-managed tactics, basically) also plays a big role. An AI is going to be able to issue a LOT more commands per second than even the most skilled humans, giving them a natural tactical advantage. Strategy is more difficult for an AI, but not…

From my naive perspective; in GO you do not need to be concerned with resource consumption/mgmt... in Starcraft and other RTS' you do.

How much more complexity is added by resource mgmt vs just "legal play possibilities" as now you have "this move isnt legal because you dont have the requisite resource, thus you need to depend on completing those moves first"

Are there any efforts applying deepmind to, say, commodities markets? Or something along those lines? Supply chains for complex hardware manufacturing logistics?

Robot assembly of complex parts in an assembly line?

Sure, AI's playing games is cool...

What I would like to see is an AI playing "Farm Simulator" to manage a vast swatch of farm equipment making and picking food over a vast expanse - with little human interaction.

* Auto dock

* Auto Harvest

* Auto Refuel

etc....