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

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

#231

If DeepMind is planning on building an AI that can beat the best human SCII player, they have their work cut out for them. I'm not sure how familiar people are with StarCraft II, but at the highest levels of the game, where player have mastered the mechanics, it's a mind game fueled by deceit, sophisticated and malleable planning, detecting subtle patterns (having a good gut feeling on what's going on) and on the pro…

I believe the same thing could be said about Go :)

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

#232
Can a simulation of a complete Starcraft game be done quickly and assuming it can't doesn't that present problems to training an AI? For example, I'm guessing complete games of Go are order of magnitudes faster to simulate which makes it more practical to do things like getting AlphaGo to play against itself to train.

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

#233
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the game wasn't balanced for the possibility of infinite micro, I think it's highly probable that there's a globally optimal strategy.

Could you give an example of what that might look like?

Just on the surface, these sorts of games are notoriously difficult to balance properly. Someone discovers a strategy that tips the balance, and units/abilities/whatever have to get nerfed. The odds that there's a stable balance at a level of play not actively tested (e.g., infinite APM) are extremely low.

One example is a sibling post's video of 100 zerglings against 20 siege tanks. For humans, the zerglings are capable of destroying only a handful of tanks before being killed of. For an AI with infinite APM, they can move all but an individual targeted zergling out of the way of the tank's splash damage. This allows them to take out all of the siege tanks with only moderate losses. Many such matchups will be tossed on their heads, and it's likely that one of them is totally game-breaking.

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

#234
post #132

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…

> 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.

Seems like they should probably tackle a game that involves strategy without micro as a stepping stone to StarCraft. Are there any games with good AIs like that already?

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

#235

If DeepMind is planning on building an AI that can beat the best human SCII player, they have their work cut out for them. I'm not sure how familiar people are with StarCraft II, but at the highest levels of the game, where player have mastered the mechanics, it's a mind game fueled by deceit, sophisticated and malleable planning, detecting subtle patterns (having a good gut feeling on what's going on) and on the pro…

> I'm not sure how familiar people are with StarCraft II, but at the highest levels of the game, where player have mastered the mechanics, it's a mind game fueled by deceit, sophisticated and malleable planning, detecting subtle patterns (having a good gut feeling on what's going on) and on the pro scene knowledge of your opponent's style.

I wouldn't be surprised if an AI comes along that shows this human perception of what it takes to win isn't required at all. I'm sure similar things were said about Go and Chess.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

restricting controls while typing is an arbitrary restriction considering they can communicate with audio asynchronously. this brings up another interesting topic all together- which is how inefficient human language is at communicating complex ideas, quickly, with people you don't know. that is- just like how AI has an obvious APM advantage, it also has an obvious communication advantage (raw serialization and deser…

Best would be if they had a language model, but no memory of communicating together in the past, so each game the AI would have the additional hurdle of building up communication.

depends on the goal, right? considering they want to limit APM in the SCII model- we can assume that goal is something like "beat a human under human conditions". in that case yes, communication needs some limitation. but this seems uninspiring. "assuming" a no-limitations AI can beat a human in RTS, the question seems more like "how many inefficiencies must we introduce before the AI is 'fair' game".

but, there is a different use case where you have an AI team try to beat another AI team under optimal conditions, which i think is more interesting, as it has the chance to completely change the metagame (like what Deep Blue and DeepMind can do for Chess/Go respectively).

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

#237

If DeepMind is planning on building an AI that can beat the best human SCII player, they have their work cut out for them. I'm not sure how familiar people are with StarCraft II, but at the highest levels of the game, where player have mastered the mechanics, it's a mind game fueled by deceit, sophisticated and malleable planning, detecting subtle patterns (having a good gut feeling on what's going on) and on the pro…

Isn't it also possible that the strategies employed by top human players (e.g. deceit, having a gut feeling of what the opponent will do) could be less effective or even useless against an AI that doesn't think or act like a human player? Given how human-influenced the meta seems to be (at least, to my understanding), it seems plausible to me that this could be the case

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

#238

If DeepMind is planning on building an AI that can beat the best human SCII player, they have their work cut out for them. I'm not sure how familiar people are with StarCraft II, but at the highest levels of the game, where player have mastered the mechanics, it's a mind game fueled by deceit, sophisticated and malleable planning, detecting subtle patterns (having a good gut feeling on what's going on) and on the pro…

> I'm not sure how familiar people are with StarCraft II, but at the highest levels of the game, where player have mastered the mechanics, it's a mind game fueled by deceit, sophisticated and malleable planning, detecting subtle patterns (having a good gut feeling on what's going on) and on the pro scene knowledge of your opponent's style. I wouldn't be surprised if an AI comes along that shows this human perception…

Both Go and Chess are perfect information games with a (mind bogglingly huge but) vanishingly small number of states/permutations compared to Starcraft. It's an entirely different beast, altogether.

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

#239

If DeepMind is planning on building an AI that can beat the best human SCII player, they have their work cut out for them. I'm not sure how familiar people are with StarCraft II, but at the highest levels of the game, where player have mastered the mechanics, it's a mind game fueled by deceit, sophisticated and malleable planning, detecting subtle patterns (having a good gut feeling on what's going on) and on the pro…

> I'm not sure how familiar people are with StarCraft II, but at the highest levels of the game, where player have mastered the mechanics, it's a mind game fueled by deceit, sophisticated and malleable planning, detecting subtle patterns (having a good gut feeling on what's going on) and on the pro scene knowledge of your opponent's style. I wouldn't be surprised if an AI comes along that shows this human perception…

Similar things weren't really said about Go or Chess. Both are perfect information games so, by definition, they can't involve deceit There's no need to try to detect subtle patterns in your opponents behavior because you have the entire game in front of you. That's not to say it's impossible but they do very much have their work cut out for them. It's an entirely different type of game that is much more difficult than Go and Chess.

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

#240

If DeepMind is planning on building an AI that can beat the best human SCII player, they have their work cut out for them. I'm not sure how familiar people are with StarCraft II, but at the highest levels of the game, where player have mastered the mechanics, it's a mind game fueled by deceit, sophisticated and malleable planning, detecting subtle patterns (having a good gut feeling on what's going on) and on the pro…

I believe the same thing could be said about Go :)

No the same thing very much could not be said about Go. Go is a perfect information game so by definition it can't involve deception. It's a completely different problem for AIs.
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