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DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

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Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

#111

Post by MichaelDickens »

strgrd wrote: post #103
qub1t wrote: post #71

A lot of people here seem to be underestimating the difficulty of this problem. There are several incorrect comments saying that in SC1 AIs have already been able to beat professionals - right now they are nowhere near that level. Go is a discrete game where the game state is 100% known at all times. Starcraft is a continuous game and the game state is not 100% known at any given time. This alone makes it a much hard…

I wonder if we will see any advanced cheese strats come out of this. I'm assuming some implementations will eventually develop micro control that is far beyond any human player's capabilities, which would make things like all-in probe rushing much more viable. Instead of playing the normal meta in a computer-vs-human, I imagine an advanced AI would simply send all of its workers off the mineral line as soon as the ga…

Previous AI StarCraft tournaments have put an actions-per-minute (APM) cap on the AIs, which prevents them from micro-managing individual units.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

#112

Post by greedy_buffer »

qub1t wrote: post #71

A lot of people here seem to be underestimating the difficulty of this problem. There are several incorrect comments saying that in SC1 AIs have already been able to beat professionals - right now they are nowhere near that level. Go is a discrete game where the game state is 100% known at all times. Starcraft is a continuous game and the game state is not 100% known at any given time. This alone makes it a much hard…

> Starcraft is a continuous game and the game state is not 100% known at any given time.

It seems to me that multiplayer games may feel continuous to a human player but are still designed around a series of discrete states called ticks where each tick is determined from the previous state plus inputs.

Why is this distinction made in the context of how difficult it is to develop an AI?

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

#113

Post by lardo »

hitekker wrote: post #59

This seems all in good fun but I wonder if it's come too late. Starcraft 2 is at its twilight. The biggest leagues of South Korea have disbanded. [1] The prolific progamers who transitioned to Starcraft 2 have gone back to Broodwar. [2] Blizzard itself has scrubbed all references to Starcraft 2 on the very home page of Starcraft. [3] Except for the twitter embed, it has only only one "2" character... in the copyright…

http://i.imgur.com/IYXYEbu.png

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

#114

Post by Garfgon »

Forrest7778 wrote: post #48
siegecraft wrote: post #4

The API Blizzard is exposing is really nice. Sadly most of the advantages AI had in SC1 were just due to the fact that an automated process could micro-manage the tasks the game didn't automate for you (a lot of boring, repetitive work). SC2 got rid of a lot of that while still allowing room for innovative and overpowered tactics to be discovered (MarineKing's insane marine micro, SlayerS killing everyone with blue f…

I'm afraid that I'm essentially nitpicking here, but the games don't really compare that linearly. For one, "insane micro" was around before SC2 and was more of a deciding factor in BW than SC2. For instance, if you pay attention and analyze pro games you'll notice that macro (the boring repetitive work) that you think was flushed out from BW was actually just translated into other, equally monotonous tasks in SC2. A…

If there's no APM limit you can do things like micro every worker's resource gathering. See http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/484849-improving-m....

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

#115

Post by scj »

indescions_2017 wrote: post #74
JefeChulo wrote: post #30

"so agents must interact with the game within limits of human dexterity in terms of “Actions Per Minute”." I am really glad they are limiting APM because otherwise things just get stupid.

OOTH, altering the source to remove any human dexterity limits and watching subsequent AI vs AI battles play out at 60fps would be really fun to spectate ;)

For SC1 BW, you can already watch https://www.youtube.com/user/certicky for a weekly highlights broadcast / commentary of AIs. Right now there is an AI arms race where the previously dominant AI (Iron Bot) is being beaten by challengers. It used to happen when Iron Bot did something silly. Now it is happening because the competitors have really stepped up their game.

The current board leader (krasi0) has a strategy similar to their predecessor (Terran Mechanical units: Tanks, Goliaths and Vultures). The alternative strategy I really enjoy watching is a Mutalisk heavy build by Arrakhammer.

The bots have styles and differing capabilities. tscmoo is one of the more fascinating ones to watch in this regard, as they mix it up better than anyone else (and tscmoop, the Protoss variation has the best High Templar storm going).

The AI APMs get into the 10k ranges at times. Watching the minimap can be like watching insects swarm.

If you want to see a game between two AIs in progress, you can watch: https://www.twitch.tv/sscait

While these AIs can pull off tactics a human player could not (what they can do with Vultures is incredible), at this point they wouldn't be able to compete with the professionals. Going back to an earlier example, I think I could use High Templars more effectively than any AI I've watched.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

#116

Post by knicholes »

keerthiko wrote: post #24
sidusknight wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you're right. Not sure what the guy is talking about.

> the guy is talking about I don't want to be overly semantic or PC on HN, but just saying the GP may be female, judging by their name on profile. Being misgendered could be very offputting and discourages participation, so you may have wanted to say "this person" even if it doesn't sound as offhand as you'd have liked it to come across.

How are you so sure the commenter is a person? ;)

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

#117

Post by mattb314 »

captainmuon wrote: post #43
siegecraft wrote: post #4

The API Blizzard is exposing is really nice. Sadly most of the advantages AI had in SC1 were just due to the fact that an automated process could micro-manage the tasks the game didn't automate for you (a lot of boring, repetitive work). SC2 got rid of a lot of that while still allowing room for innovative and overpowered tactics to be discovered (MarineKing's insane marine micro, SlayerS killing everyone with blue f…

> SC2 got rid of a lot of that You think so? My impression is that SC2 had a lot more of repetitive tasks you had to do. E.g. wall off the ramp, send a worker scouting, ... and you have to perform certain actions every X seconds (like using chrono boost). A lot or mastering the game is rote learning, and polishing a build order. Another big part is constantly scouting and reacting to what the enemy is doing. Due to t…

I think the idea of spending to upgrade your helper AI sounds really interesting and potentially novel, but it's important to push back a little bit on the idea of "removing all the rote" from an RTS. day[9] (ex Broodwar pro, current caster of many games) probably makes the argument better than I can here: https://youtu.be/EP9F-AZezCU?t=55, but one of the important implications of having repetitive aspects in an RTS is that they turn the player's attention into a resource. You can either concentrate on microing your units to squeeze the most possible value out of them, or you can focus on hitting every single production cycle back at base, but you can't do both at the same time, so deciding when to focus on what becomes part of the game. Additionally, it allows for some crazy "overcoming the odds" scenarios where a small number of units can pull off a surprising win because the player was willing to donate far more attention to them than usual. Basically, an RTS where you don't feel like you have too much to do all at once is really more like a turn based strategy game (which can be fun too).

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

#118

Post by haeffin »

qub1t wrote: post #71

A lot of people here seem to be underestimating the difficulty of this problem. There are several incorrect comments saying that in SC1 AIs have already been able to beat professionals - right now they are nowhere near that level. Go is a discrete game where the game state is 100% known at all times. Starcraft is a continuous game and the game state is not 100% known at any given time. This alone makes it a much hard…

I don't know if I would label SC2 as continuous. I don't think anything happens to the game state at a finer granularity than tick level. So to me it seems that it's also discrete (but with the state changing 44.8 a second at default speed). I agree though that this looks more challenging for ML methods.

I haven't looked at if they limit the rate of commands that the AI can issue, otherwise this will be something that can be a very big advantage to the AI once it learns to micro ...

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

#120

Post by sanderjd »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #111
strgrd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we will see any advanced cheese strats come out of this. I'm assuming some implementations will eventually develop micro control that is far beyond any human player's capabilities, which would make things like all-in probe rushing much more viable. Instead of playing the normal meta in a computer-vs-human, I imagine an advanced AI would simply send all of its workers off the mineral line as soon as the ga…

Previous AI StarCraft tournaments have put an actions-per-minute (APM) cap on the AIs, which prevents them from micro-managing individual units.

I think this definitely needs to be the case if this is going to be an interesting research project at all.

Edit: Nevermind, my intuition in this seems to be wrong - someone more knowledgeable about this claims below that computer mechanics are still not as good as a good human's in the SC1 version of this.

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