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Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

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Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starcraft is an incredibly complex game. 10^26 possible moves at any point (you can click/drag anywhere on the screen, pressing a keyboard button as you do so), imperfect information, real-time constraints, etc.

That pales in comparison to starcraft at a higher resolution, which has even more points to click on screen! And even that is nothing compared to playing horseshoes in the physical world. There are an infinite number of moves at any given moment! And an infinite number of moments! Horseshoes is clearly the most complex game of all.

Plank would like to say something to you about lengths.

Which is why the most complex game of all is actually intergalactic horseshoes.

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#162
We need to create an open source organization to build these brains at home because: "Recomputing the AlphaGo Zero weights will take about 1700 years on commodity hardware."[1]

I see these huge AI brains creating a new class divide between people who have access to these new AI brains and those who don't. The mission of open source has always been to break down these barriers to empowerment with technology. Thus, this is a great area for open source innovation.

[1] https://github.com/leela-zero/leela-zero

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#163
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starcraft is an incredibly complex game. 10^26 possible moves at any point (you can click/drag anywhere on the screen, pressing a keyboard button as you do so), imperfect information, real-time constraints, etc.

Starcraft is an incredibly complex game. Even basic strategies will win if they’re done faster. APM (actions per minute) is a very significant factor into who is winning. Apparently they limited their AI player to 264 APM but that’s still incredibly high and done with machine level consistency. That’s almost 4.5 actions per second!! I know there are human level players at and probably above that level but that really…

> Even basic strategies will win if they’re done faster.

This isn't really true. Basic strategies done faster still lose miserably to humans, we can see this from the long history of SC Broodwar AI tournaments where they have a human play the best AI at the end (and always win).

Faster helps, better strategy helps more, maybe we can't say the AI is doing as well as the top humans at strategy since it's faster, but we can say that it's doing pretty good.

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#164
post #58

Has anyone read the actual paper ? This summary really makes it look like "mission accomplished", but this was much much more interesting than that. We saw AI do "obviously stupid things", and we also saw them improve a lot in the middle of the trial, as many youtubers showed. AI was also much more interesting when playing the protoss race, and really felt like it was responding to the opponents actions, and the othe…

IMO it's a testament to how games like SC are collectively and thoroughly "solved" by the community, and how the games aren't that complex after all. I never followed SC or SC2, but my observation of the pro scene and competitive ladder for Warcraft 3 was that cookie cutter strats dominated. Pro players were typically those who executed best, not those who innovated best. Personally I felt disappointed by the fact th…

because the real skill is in the micro

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#165
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment was originally posted on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21408024 , but we've merged it into the earlier submission, which used the link you mentioned.

The viewers of HN need Nature just as much as anybody, stop deluding yourself into thinking this is some kind of ivory tower...

Agreed. The average hn'er these days is on par with the average redditor, IQ and woke-wise.

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#166
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment was originally posted on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21408024 , but we've merged it into the earlier submission, which used the link you mentioned.

The viewers of HN need Nature just as much as anybody, stop deluding yourself into thinking this is some kind of ivory tower...

[deleted]

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#167

1. Create a realistic military combat game with AI that learns from thousands of players and builds on that knowledge across multiple games/matches. 2. Load that AI into real-world Terminators.

Yes, this was exactly my reaction: this work seems to be depressingly applicable to real-world warmaking, yet we are only focused on the technical successes, and not on the systemic dangers that we are heedlessly creating.

Assuming that everyone looking at this work is a friend who will not turn it to military advantage is extraordinarily naive on our part.

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#168
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The speed at which AlphaStar overtook previous AIs seems to me to be nearly unprecedented in AI research. Is it not simply the case that, before AlphaStar, very little money and effort was being put into developing AIs for Starcraft 2?

What makes this amazing isn't specific to StarCraft 2. AI in strategy games has been really lackluster. I can't think of a single example of a strategy game where an AI was competitive against experienced players due to strategy and tactics, rather than inhuman speed, accuracy or cheating. So it's not just about AI in StarCraft 2, but rather AI in essentially any (strategy) game. Now we have an example of an AI that…

There is a genuine advance here, but keep in mind that when an AI is developed by the game developers, they're not necessarily playing to win, but to make the AI fun to beat, and without using too much computer power, which would make the game slower. Also, due to commercial pressures it's tough to put a lot of effort into the AI for a game that's still being changed to make it more fun.

Even now, I wouldn't really expect to see most game developers start using the latest machine learning techniques to build their own AI's. Maybe the really successful games with competitive leagues might be interested?

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#169
post #58

Has anyone read the actual paper ? This summary really makes it look like "mission accomplished", but this was much much more interesting than that. We saw AI do "obviously stupid things", and we also saw them improve a lot in the middle of the trial, as many youtubers showed. AI was also much more interesting when playing the protoss race, and really felt like it was responding to the opponents actions, and the othe…

IMO it's a testament to how games like SC are collectively and thoroughly "solved" by the community, and how the games aren't that complex after all. I never followed SC or SC2, but my observation of the pro scene and competitive ladder for Warcraft 3 was that cookie cutter strats dominated. Pro players were typically those who executed best, not those who innovated best. Personally I felt disappointed by the fact th…

> my observation of the pro scene and competitive ladder for Warcraft 3 was that cookie cutter strats dominated. Pro players were typically those who executed best, not those who innovated best.

Warcraft 3 and broodwar were much more micro-oriented than sc2 (because ai was much worse for example if you let dragoons to walk to their target on their own they spend half the time fighting broken pathfinding while the enemy shoots at them :) This almost never happens in sc2, and microing units below master league is usually detrimental to the game).

I think the micro vs macro is not the full image, and sc2 lets player express themselves on what i would call mediumgame (something that is between buildorders and microing - like deciding when to expand, what tech-switch to make, how to position your army in between fights, etc).

There's lots of decisionmaking that isn't APM-limited but thinking-time limited in SC2, and it's not as codified as buildorders. But you can certainly simplify the games to "archon immortal vs bio terran", and then it's very repetative.

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#170
post #159

This is a really interesting one to digest. As with previous announcements about AlphaStar, much of the feedback (here and elsewhere) is about the fundamental challenge of assessing human vs. machine in an RTS. These points are very valid - stepping back however, this still feels like a pretty incredible accomplishment. I'm a gold league SC2 player, so maybe in the 30th-50th percentile. Three years ago, when DeepMind…

> This is like if the world's best chess AI had gone from losing high school tournaments to being competitive with Kasparov in less than 3 years. I don't think it's like that at all. On the high level, there is no "chess AI", "go AI", "image classification AI" and "dexterous manipulation AI". These are all sides of the same coin, that gets significantly better every year. Adding support for the new game or new "envir…

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