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DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

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171–180 of 283 posts

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

#171
post #19
post #10

That's surprising. I thought Bliz didn't want anyone near sc2 but approved of sc1 being used for this purpose.

SC1 really doesn't make sense for this, 80% of the skill is just keeping on top of the mindless but mechanically intensive stuff, which is trivial beyond trivial for an AI. SC2's automated away most of this (pretty much everything but production cycles), which makes it a better measure for AI vs human.

> SC1 really doesn't make sense for this, 80% of the skill is just keeping on top of the mindless but mechanically intensive stuff, which is trivial beyond trivial for an AI.

If that were true, then AIs would be dominant in BW instead of still bad at the game.

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

#172
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…

As a long time StarCraft fan I don't share your point of view : People usually refer to StarCraft as a strategy game but there's actually really little strategy involved : during the first weeks after a new map pool is released, the pro players explore different build orders that are strong on it. And after this period, when the meta-game has settled, the winner of a match (best of 3 or 5) is almost always the one wh…

Actually I realize that my cyclist vs motorcycle analogy is better that I first thought :

You might think that a race between the winner of the last Tour de France and an automated motorcycle is a good challenge because automated driving is hard (especially with crowd running around on the road and temporary road signs for the race circuit).

But in fact it wouldn't be funny because all the motorcycle have to do is follow the cyclist during the whole race (which is not really challenging in term of self driving AI) and just sprint during the last couple dozen metters with no hope for the cyclist to win.

It might only become interesting AI-wise if you add arbitrary rules like «limit the power of the motorcycle» and/or «limit the amount of fuel to limit the number of accelerations». But you're not really doing a Man vs Machine challenge.

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

#173
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time StarCraft fan I don't share your point of view : People usually refer to StarCraft as a strategy game but there's actually really little strategy involved : during the first weeks after a new map pool is released, the pro players explore different build orders that are strong on it. And after this period, when the meta-game has settled, the winner of a match (best of 3 or 5) is almost always the one wh…

Do StarCraft AIs (the ones that are included with the game) cheat? (e.g. can they see past the fog of war?)

The ones built into the game can see past fog of war. Blizzard published a nice overview of how they work, though I don't think it actually mentions that cheat. http://classic.battle.net/scc/faq/aiscripts.shtml

The ones created using BWAPI cannot (you can call a function that lets you, but it's banned in all tournaments). The one thing that BWAPI bots know that a human doesn't is a persistent unit ID - if a marine leaves fog of war and comes back, you can check if the ID is the same and know whether it's the same marine. It also tells you where cloaked units are, but a skilled eye can see those already.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time StarCraft fan I don't share your point of view : People usually refer to StarCraft as a strategy game but there's actually really little strategy involved : during the first weeks after a new map pool is released, the pro players explore different build orders that are strong on it. And after this period, when the meta-game has settled, the winner of a match (best of 3 or 5) is almost always the one wh…

Interesting. So would you say that there are two parts here, figuring out a general strategy for a new map and then maximizing execution?

More often than not, yes even though there's some counter-examples with some players playing against the meta with great succès.

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

#175

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…

People were still very excited about Go even if people in the US likely didn't really play a lot of Go before AlphaGo. It will be super good PR for DeepMind and Facebook AI Research (who are doing Broodwar). It will probably not reanimate the pro scenes in any lasting manner, however.

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

#176
post #151
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

usaphp's point seems to be that the period should be less than one minute. When the police measure your speed with radar they are not waiting an hour to average your speed. The same idea applies here.

Yep, I entirely understand the point. Consider that when the police measure your speed, they're still measuring in MPH. Just because the units contains a specific time-frame (hours), doesn't mean the measurement is made over an hour.

Similarly, just because the units for APM contains a specific time-frame (minutes) doesn't mean the measurement must be made over a minute. A 150APM limit doesn't necessarily mean that the running average over a minute must stay below 150 actions any more than a 65MPH speed limit doesn't mean that the running average over an hour must stay below 65MPH. If a police officer catches you going faster than 65MPH even for a single second (or however long a radar gun takes), they can pull you over.

The units of a measurement do not dictate how the measurement is made.

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

#177
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of AoE 2, I really hope this research ends up benefiting that game. The AI in it has always been so bad but it's still my favorite game of all time.

Have you played against the updated AI in Aoe2 HD?

It is hard but my impression is it's because it cheats. I'm more looking for interesting AI (creativity, adaptation) rather than raw difficulty due to its ability to spam military.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, very nitpicky. MarineKingPrime didn't invent marine micro but he was known for it/popularized in the early GSL seasons before it became a standard tactic. SlayerS (the team) dominated MLG Anaheim with blue flame hellions and basically caused them to get nerfed if I recall.

I don't believe he's being that nitpicky. Brood War had a lot of micro, including marine micro... Boxer (SlayerS_Boxer is who I think you are referring to, as he also played starcraft 2) was well known for having really insane marine micro in the community before SC2 even came out. Starcraft 2 was just way bigger in the west so more people over here associate MarineKingPrime with micro than brood war pros. e.g. https…

I guess what I was trying to say, in general, was that since SC2 required less micromanagement of your macro (auto-harvesting, etc), players had more free time to spend on unit tactics.

In GSL season 2, MarineKing showed that stimmed marines could counter banelings. Then the rest of the playerbase quickly adapted his tactics.

At MLG Anaheim (2013), the SlayerS terrans (ie multiple members of the SlayerS team) placed 2nd, 3rd, and 4th and destroyed all zergs with their blue flame hellion play.

Those are just two examples of the sorts of tactics that once discovered are quickly assimilated into the metagame and quickly go from innovative to standard play. So my hope was that AI could speed up the pace of tactical innovation.

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

#179
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…

As a long time StarCraft fan I don't share your point of view : People usually refer to StarCraft as a strategy game but there's actually really little strategy involved : during the first weeks after a new map pool is released, the pro players explore different build orders that are strong on it. And after this period, when the meta-game has settled, the winner of a match (best of 3 or 5) is almost always the one wh…

I used to be pretty active on iccup, and I was a masters-level sc2 player for a while during the beta and when it was first released. So I'm definitely familiar with starcraft and what it takes to become a good player.

I think you're misunderstanding a big part of what is "easy" and "difficult" for humans vs ai. Yes, go is absolutely a more challenging games for humans than starcraft (I also play go, although not very well - currently around ~7k on igs). Starcraft is strategically a much simpler game than go. You are correct in stating that mechanics is what makes starcraft hard for most people, and yes if the computer knew exactly what to do, it would be able to execute it faster and without making any multi-tasking mistakes. But strategy is not what makes starcraft a challenge for ai. Tasks that are trivial for humans can be extremely difficult for ai.

Computers are way better at tree searching than humans, for the obvious reason that they run much faster than brains. So games with relatively small state-spaces, like checkers, are solved quickly. But as you increase the state space, it becomes impossible to search all possible future moves, and this was why go was intractable for such a long time.

The big advancement in alphago is that by using deep learning it is able to evaluate different board-states without doing any search, using a neural net. This allows it to massively prune the search space. Humans are able to do this through "intuition" gained through experience - talk to any advanced go player and ask them about specific moves and they will tell you things like "this shape is bad" or "it felt like this was a point of thinness". AlphaGo was able to gain this "intuition" by training on a massive dataset of go board positions.

In go, the rules are very simple - 19x19 board, each turn you can put a stone in any not-surrounded open space. Its also a turn based game. The state at any given time is fully known. Starcraft is real-time, there are tons of different actions you can take, the actions are not independent (pressing attack does something different if you have a unit selected or not), the game state is not fully known and a given state can mean different things depending on what preceeded it. Not to mention that the search space is massively massively larger. To create a representation of this that can be fed into a neural net and give meaningful results (something like at a given tick, score all possible actions and find the best one) is going to be incredibly difficult. An order of magnitude more difficult than go, imo.

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

#180
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do StarCraft AIs (the ones that are included with the game) cheat? (e.g. can they see past the fog of war?)

The ones built into the game can see past fog of war. Blizzard published a nice overview of how they work, though I don't think it actually mentions that cheat. http://classic.battle.net/scc/faq/aiscripts.shtml The ones created using BWAPI cannot (you can call a function that lets you, but it's banned in all tournaments). The one thing that BWAPI bots know that a human doesn't is a persistent unit ID - if a marine le…

Are you sure? I remember the video about the whole blizzard story and the Ai creator of starcraft2 said that the new AIs, compared to those of starcraft, have only the same information a player has and no way to "cheat"
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