There's something funny about a company that is actively developing bleeding edge AI technology, but who can't design a webpage that works on mobile without crashing.
DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
121–130 of 283 posts
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#122"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.
IMO there should also be a precision limit. The timing of actions should include human-typical jitter and the wrong action should sometimes be activated to simulate misclicks/fat-finger keypresses — e.g., messing up a control group by assinging a unit to the wrong number key. The bot must also not be able to act faster than human reaction times (~250ms), this could be enforced by adding a fixed delay to the observati…
ideally they'd train it on real keypresses rather than actions
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#123A 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?
You're basically correct in terms of SC not technically being continuous. There are discrete steps under the hood.
One of the significant challenges is figuring out how to use 42ms (the frame duration on fastest speed) of computing time to decide what actions, if any, to take next. You don't have the luxury of taking many minutes to decide one move as you would in a game like chess or go. You also don't alternate taking discrete turns with your opponent, despite having discrete frames. It may be best to not take an action in a given frame. This is particularly true if the AI is attempting to stay under an APM threshold, as it has to decide if an action is worth the opportunity cost.
It is also necessary for a quality SC AI to remember what has happened in the past. A chess board position is identical regardless of how the game got there, but this is not the case in StarCraft. An AI has accumulated lots of information about its opponent that is no longer visible to it in the current frame (unit movements, gas/mineral counts, number of workers active, etc), and this needs to be recalled and play into decision making.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Speed is in MPH or KPH, would it be better to go by m/s? The convention in gaming is APM, so they're just using the nomenclature that is already understood.
Maybe what usaphp is getting at is that the AI could still gain an advantage by doing a set of actions much faster than humanly possible in just a fraction of a second as long as it kept its total number of actions that minute below the cap.
A 65MPH speed limit doesn't mean I can go 100MPH for some section of the road, and 30MPH for another section and still be in compliance.
Similarly, an APM limit wouldn't directly imply that the kind of "gaming" that you're talking about, where a user/agent simply has to have an average APM over a certain period to be in compliance.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
This surprises me - I would have expected the computer mechanics to be much better than what a human can achieve. Do you have insight into why that isn't true?
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it that much computation to simulate an entire game? You obviously don't need to render the graphics or anything, it should just be a list of events that occur, which doesn't seem all that slow to process.
Until today's release of the headless Linux client, you still had to run the full StarCraft program, which gets expensive fast. And it massively complicates the workflow to have to play through every game serially to recreate the state rather than simply reading random rows of data from a 300GB dataframe on disk.
FYI, there are two things being discussed here. There dataset linked in the comment above is for Brood War. The headless client released today is for SC2.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
You're basically correct in terms of SC not technically being continuous. There are discrete steps under the hood. One of the significant challenges is figuring out how to use 42ms (the frame duration on fastest speed) of computing time to decide what actions, if any, to take next. You don't have the luxury of taking many minutes to decide one move as you would in a game like chess or go. You also don't alternate tak…
SC2 ticks faster than SC1 - you only have 22ms. You don't need to tie everything to tick rate though, a strategy module could update way slower.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#128[deleted]
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#129It's a bit too bad they're having to move towards supervised learning and imitation learning. I totally understand why they need to do that given the insane decision trees, but I was really hoping to see what the AI would learn to do without any human example, simply because it would be inhuman and interesting. I'm really interested in particular if an unsupervised AI would use very strange building placements and pe…
Well the unsupervised ai couldn’t even do basic tasks from the video I saw, so looks like we have a long way to go.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#130> even strong baseline agents, such as A3C, cannot win a single game against even the easiest built-in AI. Then, why not release code for the built in ai, and improve on it ? Or is the built in ai cheating ?
The built in ai is scripted whereas they’re trying to teach agents to learn the game from scratch with some sort of reward-based/machine learning approach.