Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster. • Hacker News Board

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#51

Post by endtime » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 12:49 PM UTC

algorias wrote: post #47

endtime wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't even get a scout worker to your opponent's base before they're up to 9-10 workers or more on most maps. Anyway, killing one worker of 6 is 17% of someone's economy, not 1%.

Killing a worker early is subject to compound interest, so that 17% (or 10% more realistically) of an early worker kill is going to grow exponentially all game long.

>an early worker kill is going to grow exponentially all game long.

That's a very unrealistic claim, though yes, losing a worker very early can have a measurable effect. But that pretty much never happens, outside of all-in cheeses like 6 pool or proxy 2 rax/gate.

Are you defending the original claim that games are decided over affecting 1% of one's opponents economy?

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#52

Post by d0m » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 1:34 PM UTC

So much stuff can be learned from sc/sc2 to apply in your life. Things from accepting defeat and understanding your mistakes, to know how to fight strategically. (By fight I mean it in a very vague way; Fight for a girl, Fight for a new job, etc.)

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#53

Post by d0m » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 1:38 PM UTC

In my opinion, the most important concept to understand is "Timing windows". Vs a equally skilled player, you can't have all the advantages. Understanding the imbalances of a current situation - and taking advantage of it - is really what differentiate beginners from great players.

Sometime, in a game of 30mins, there's only a few seconds where you have the upper hand.. and this is where you need to attack. Miss that moment (from a couple of seconds!!) and you lose. Go a little bit before, and you lose!

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#54

Post by sireat » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 1:38 PM UTC

andfarm wrote: post #22

gcp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe Day 9 did indeed get his masters this year from Harvey Mudd. (original article was written 4 years ago)

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#55

Post by monkeypizza » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 1:53 PM UTC

The new 4-5dan go-playing bots on kgs (zen19d, crazystone) use this strategy extensively. When they're ahead they play to consolidate their biggest weakness, and when they're behind they play more and more risky moves to try to come back. In the endgame the calculate the score exactly, and will play negative point value moves as long as they are ahead on the board.

It makes for a really tough game, cause if you do get ahead, you have to face a series of attacks which almost but don't quite work, and if you mess up any of them it's over.

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#56

Post by seri » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 2:06 PM UTC

bz wrote: post #26

The 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 apparen…

That was awesome, sir. I love the attention to details in the scenario you described and your analysis. I only picked up the hobby of watching Starcraft about 6 months ago (I watch more Broodwar than Starcraft II), but I used to play a lot, albeit at an amateur level. I watched popular casters like diggity, Klazart, Nuke, and moletrap. However, sometimes I don't quite understand why the winner wins even though I have consumed a lot of theories in advance, perhaps for the exact reason you just pointed out. There are good comments on Team Liquid every now and then but the site is hard to browse with 100 pages on average for a popular game.

Do you write game analysis like this somewhere, or do you know where I can read something similar?

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#57

Post by seri » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 2:12 PM UTC

ralfd wrote: post #44

seri wrote: post #18

Day9 hosted an event called The After Hours Gaming League in which eight tech companies will compete each other for charity. The event has just finished its first season with team Microsoft crushing everyone else. Zynga is the runner up and Google claimed third place. Games: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ahgl Homepage: http://afterhoursgaming.tv/ There are a number of interesting game theory articles on…

I was really impressed how Microsoft steamrolled everyone!

I was less impressed with Microsoft's performance than their team spirit. After all, the mere fact that MSFT has way more employees than the other teams already means that they should be stronger. However, I was surprised that they set up an internal league to select who will get to play, and that there were many MSFT people watching together live on the grand finals day. It just seems like they take fun seriously (to quote Day9 himself), and that's pretty cool IMO.

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#58

Post by lobo_tuerto » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 2:21 PM UTC

There is no _Game theory_ mentioned anywhere in the article, but _Competitive game design theory_.

Title should be changed to reflect that as to not bring confusion about it referring to the broad (and complex) Game theory subject.

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#59

Post by wtvanhest » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 2:27 PM UTC

I just read all the comments because the author states that one program collects the maximum amount of stones, and another competitor's program figured out how to collect an additional stone.

Does this not make sense to anyone else? Can someone please explain it to me?

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#60

Post by Tichy » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 2:34 PM UTC

wtvanhest wrote: post #59

I just read all the comments because the author states that one program collects the maximum amount of stones, and another competitor's program figured out how to collect an additional stone. Does this not make sense to anyone else? Can someone please explain it to me?

Maybe the "one more stone" strategy leaves more options to the decider algorith and is therefore less likely to get stuck in a local maximum that ultimately leads to a loss.