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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

#101

Post by visarga »

hacker_9 wrote: post #55
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.

AI is terrible in games because it's literally such a hard problem. Thinking like a human, working in a group, overcoming obstacles and reacting to dynamic behaviour from the human player. This is far harder that Go which has 100x simpler rules. Additionally they had a mega ton of training data to feed into the Go model to begin with, which a game won't have as the data structures will all be different under the hood…

The reason they picked this challenge is to work on problems where the whole state of the game is not immediately accessible (games of partial information, as opposed to chess and Go). Compared to AlphaGo, it is much more similar to the situations humans encounter in daily life.

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

#102

Post by reilly3000 »

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.

Isn't most game ai based on FSMs? I'm curious about how a deep learning approach would work against a large set of players with varying skill levels.

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

#103

Post by reilly3000 »

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.

Isn't most game ai based on FSMs? I'm curious about how a deep learning approach would work against a large set of players with varying skill levels.

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

#105

Post by fitzwatermellow »

Training data? After all, AlphaGo trained on a database of over 30M expert human moves. I suspect one championship round from Team EnVy is worth billions of iterations of random exploration ;)

Kudos to both Blizzard and DeepMind. Anticipating a lot of fun with this. StarCraft 2 could indeed become the AI pedagogy standard.

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

#106

Post by chronic6l »

ssalazar wrote: post #89
spacehacker wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must admit that there is an underlying aggressive theme in games like StarCraft. The visuals show clear resemblance of people being killed by projectiles and by other war technology. The AI will be rewarded for skillfully decimating the enemy, for protecting the units it has control over and for coming up with strategies like ambush, raids, patrolling etc. I am more convinced by the idea that an AI will be able g…

> You must admit that there is an underlying aggressive theme in these games. The visuals show clear resemblance of people being killed by projectiles and by other war technology. An AI doesn't know or care about any of this. Literally its applying statistics to optimize a cost function or assign labels to input states. These numbers could represent number of kills or number of dollars; the computer doesn't care.

The computer doesn't even know what a kill is.

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

#107

Post by placeybordeaux »

caylus wrote: post #88
wlesieutre wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it seem to know which zergling is about to get hit?

Because the tanks are using the default unit AI, which AFAIK amounts to "when your weapon is ready to fire, shoot the closest enemy in range". The zergling AI knows the attack range and rate of each tank so can ensure that the closest zergling is always on its own when a tank is ready to fire. What would be really interesting is putting a similar smart AI on the tanks, which could make decisions like shooting at the…

Game theory dictates that you shouldn't anticipate what your opponent is likely to do, but rather assume that they will chose the best choice available. Given that you need to move the zerglings before the tank fires the tank should be able to retarget and always hit the highest concentration. That being said organizing your lings to run in a formation to never expose any to splash shouldn't be too hard.

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

#108

Post by erik »

placeybordeaux wrote: post #69
lanius wrote: post #51

I can't wait to see how far DeepMind can go in this area. I was initially skeptical that AlphaGo could defeat top human players, but then it happened. Who knows, perhaps one day AI can compete against progamers in GSL!

Competitive AI in broodwar already can destroy the best humans. AI can use strategies and tactics that human can't effectively do. Most notable is perfect splitting which changes the game quite a bit.

Do you have a reference on this? Last I looked into it broodwar AI bots were easily beaten by competent humans.

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

#109

Post by hughes »

tylerpachal wrote: post #4
Miner49er wrote: post #2

Looks like they are going to limit the APM of the AI. I wonder how they are going to decide the limit? I've never played StarCraft, but from what I understand very high APM is needed to play the game at the highest levels.

I've followed the professional StarCraft 2 scene for a long time now. There were a few players who were famous for having high APMs, here is an over-the-sholder view of one of them [1]. I don't have a reference but believe he used to play in the ~500APM range. That would probably be the upper limit of a human's ability. [1] https://youtu.be/WHcl6Cs1FAM?t=7m57s

I wouldn't be surprised if a 500APM player is making closer to 100 meaningful actions per minute. It looks like most of the actions are spam that may register on the APM meter but not affect the outcome of the game.

An AI limited to even 200 decision-driven actions per minute would probably have a significant advantage over a "500APM" player.

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

#110

Post by bduerst »

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.

The I/O with the hardest part.

How would you scale for games with different inputs and outputs?

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