This marginal advantage strategy is also well demonstrated in professional tennis. When you are in control of the rally, going for a shot which maintains your offensive position, with the potential to slightly extend your lead within the rally, is best. Often the defensive player will go for a huge winner if they are getting tired or are so out of position as to be unable to recover by hitting several good marginal defensive shots to get the point back to a neutral position. But if you watch the best players, they all have skills which gain or erase the most marginal advantages.
Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
21–30 of 85 posts
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#22If I remember correctly from my college AI days, thinking about upcoming turns and minimizing your opponent's gains is called minimax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax I'm surprised that there was only one AI in the competition that did this. We were all expected to use this strategy in my class. Once everybody's figured this out, it becomes a game of: - Who can think ahead the most turns? - Who has the best "am…
I agree, the Mancala backstory sounds quite strange and unbelievable. To me it looks like it's made up (maybe partly on some vague recollection of the author) to serve as an introduction for the rest of the article. The behavior of AI programming winning by 1 point does exist in real life for Monte-Carlo based agents calculating winning probabilities. You can see it in computer go games.
It's almost certainly based on the author's experience in Harvey Mudd's CS 151 (Artificial Intelligence) course, in which developing a Mancala AI is a standard project.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#23My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won. The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, an…
"Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. [...] Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defea…
Sun Tzu was my first thought as well:
"The pinnacle of military excellence is not to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles. It is to subjugate your enemy without fighting."
Eg, to have the foresight and strategy to circumscribe and constrain your adversary's degrees of freedom until the only one left is capitulation.
Pretty cool that there are videogames rich enough for that to be applicable.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#24If I remember correctly from my college AI days, thinking about upcoming turns and minimizing your opponent's gains is called minimax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax I'm surprised that there was only one AI in the competition that did this. We were all expected to use this strategy in my class. Once everybody's figured this out, it becomes a game of: - Who can think ahead the most turns? - Who has the best "am…
I agree, the Mancala backstory sounds quite strange and unbelievable. To me it looks like it's made up (maybe partly on some vague recollection of the author) to serve as an introduction for the rest of the article. The behavior of AI programming winning by 1 point does exist in real life for Monte-Carlo based agents calculating winning probabilities. You can see it in computer go games.
Yup the strategies described are very primitive and explained quite vaguely. That was the first thing I noticed. You don't make AI to capture the maximum number of pieces and you don't make AI to get only 1 piece advantage. I may be wrong here as I dont know anything about Mancala.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#25As many of the sc2 players here might know, the guy who wrote this (day9) is one of the famous person in esports right now. He used to be a professional player of sc, but since sc2 appeared (2010) he dedicated to analyze the game, and has even a daily show about it. The interesting thing about starcraft is that it's played _so_ much (in s. korea is a profession, kids actually go to live in "pro houses" were they play…
The game is played at a high level, sure, but I'd call this a slight exaggeration. 1% of a player's income is less than a single worker even in the late game (when most players have around 70 workers), and a single worker kill never really makes a huge difference.
Depends when the kill is. A single worker from your initial 6? Big problem.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#26The concepts outlined are pretty good, but I want to make a counterpoint against heuristics in general. Distilled ideas like these are certainly useful for trying to grasp a complex system, but they do not, for the non-expert player, represent game knowledge. Let me explain why.
The pitfall for the average viewer/player is to take these mantras and apply them directly to what they see. They see a game where T apparently overcommits after winning an engagement at his 3rd, and wonder why he didn't take a 4th instead. Surely, this is a mistake of not getting more ahead!
An expert player might look at the same scenario and see an entirely different picture. The problem was that he scanned a 15m timing instead of a 17m timing for the Hive, so he was actually behind in that engagement (he should have decisively won with the Z's gas locked up elsewhere!). And that Broodlords would be due out in 2 production cycles, but it takes 3m for him to break-even on the new mine, and he would miss the window to secure enough of an advantage to push the game into a low-econ trade phase.
My point is that real game understanding is extremely specific. It's all about the actual state and timing. To go back to the article, that's where the marginal advantages are gained - by understanding and controlling how these extremely specific scenarios play out. The larger ideas about strategy that everyone loves fall out from the analyses of these interactions. But "getting" the general idea isn't the same as actually _getting_ it when you work out these scenarios and timings yourself from extensive playing/testing. So heuristics are really only part of the picture, the much larger part is a precise understanding of the system at work.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#27The author stated, "Third, a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance or luck. Ideally, the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible." Do you think this is always the case? I'm thinking about texas hold 'em, which has short-term variability but the stronger players win over the long run with a better strategy. Does chance…
The relevant quote here is, "People don't gamble on Chess."
A luck element lets players of uneven skill feel engaged. Even better is a great handicapping system like Go has, but that's notoriously hard to design.
Chess is a great game at certain skill levels and has a lot of beauty to it, but games with enough of a skill difference aren't really interesting for either player unless the better player is teaching/mentoring.
So yeah, luck has some place in letting different people (and even gamble) together.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#28The author stated, "Third, a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance or luck. Ideally, the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible." Do you think this is always the case? I'm thinking about texas hold 'em, which has short-term variability but the stronger players win over the long run with a better strategy. Does chance…
In Texas Hold 'Em, competitive matches are rarely decided in a single hand; rather, they are played out over many hands through the course of a day. When you average out over dozens of hands, a substantially worse player actually does have an almost zero chance of besting a superior player.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#29The author stated, "Third, a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance or luck. Ideally, the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible." Do you think this is always the case? I'm thinking about texas hold 'em, which has short-term variability but the stronger players win over the long run with a better strategy. Does chance…
Yes. In Starcraft, it is not uncommon for players to attempt to force a win by going for an all-in strategy that sacrifices long-term income for lots of first-tier combat units. The chance aspect is that there are more starting locations than there are players. If your opponent does not find you quickly enough and you are relatively close, both of which are purely matters of chance, you can overrun them, almost regardless of skill differences.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#30Am I the only one that thought this post would have been about Economic Game Theory? - http://www.dklevine.com/general/whatis.htm
Very nice read though. Day9 is right. The best players all seem to have a knack for maintaining a marginal advantage or taking a small one and getting a bigger advantage.