181–190 of 283 posts
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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.
Interesting to see unfold.
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Would not actions per second be a better limit tho?
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.
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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 tha…
It's not literally continuous, but it is real-time rather than turn-based, and positions of units are essentially floats rather than (a small range of) ints. That makes it effectively continuous (too large to just generate a tree of all possible actions and then prune).
-- If this is the case though, the space could be represented by taking larger integer values (say, a magnitude of 1 or 2 higher) to represent positions at a fractional pixel level (say, in 100ths of a pixel).
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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…
As someone who probably has played at a higher level than you I disagree. Yes, it's true that mechanics are a large determinant in who wins between people. But pro humans are not easily thrown off by odd or novel strategies or tactics. They can react to things that introduce small wrenches into their build order without serious issues. Players can even adapt to things they've never seen before. The issue with Starcra…
In tournament, with all the inducted stress they definitely do : see Lilbow vs Life in blizzcon 2015, or the whole run of Symbol in Iron Squid one. For BW, see Flash vs Stork in whatever MSL or OSL finals (in 2009 or 2010 I think).
> the neural nets will have nothing to account for, say, a mid-game cannon rush, or whatever.
The AI just need to know how many 2-2 zerglings you need to destroy a cannon in that position (or hydras, or whatever unit it has available around and pick the most cost-effective way to deal with the cannon). The thing is that the AI can deal with this in the most efficient way while perfectly microing two groups of mutalisks and defending against a reaver drop[1].
In fact you don't even need deep learning for that since there's a finite number of encounters like this (cannon vs any unit) and I'm pretty sure some guy on TeamLiquid already covered it in depth :p.
> there have been plenty of AI competitions using Brood War
AI competition featuring matches of AI vs AI are interesting, my point is that AI vs man probably won't.
[1] OK, I'm mixing events really unlikely to occure at the same time but you get the idea.
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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 fo…
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Why would that be ideal? Wouldn't that just make ML at the strategy layer harder without doing anything to make the discoveries more valuable?
to emulate human handicaps at the interface layer. I didn't say it would be free
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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 ver…
> Not to mention that the search space is massively massively larger
That's what I'm not really convinced about. The build-order space is not that big (compared to Go's positions) and once you got a good micro-management engine I'm affraid this will lead to something like : if protos or zerg pick protoss then 8 gate -> 9 pylon -> scout : if no counter to 4-gates, then 4-gates and win from out-microing.
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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 ver…
It still uses a Monte-Carlo Tree Search to get to the level where it can beat human pro players.
>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.
And yet StarCraft is extremely primitive as far as strategy games go. Most of the stuff you can do in the game simply doesn't matter, and the stuff that matters could be modeled at a much coarser level than what people see on the screen. Knowing how this stuff works, I'm willing to bet this is exactly how Deep Mind will approach the problem. They will try many different sets of hand-engineered features and game representations, then not mention any of the failed efforts in their press releases and research papers.
The choice of StarCraft as their next target reeks of a PR stunt. Sure, there might be no AIs that play at pro level now, but there wasn't any serious effort or incentive to build one either, and now Google will throw millions of dollars and a data-center worth of hardware at this problem.
As far as I'm concerned, real AI research right now isn't about surpassing human performance at tasks where computers are already doing okay. It's about achieving reasonable level of performance in domains where computers are doing extremely badly. But that won't get you a lot of coverage from the clueless tech press, I guess.
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…
Mostly because no one cared enough about solving this to spend 1/100th of the resources Google will undoubtedly throw at it.
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I wonder if limiting APM would be a simple way to make the AI's play more "human" and less exploit-y.
Limiting APM is definitely a step in the right direction, but there are ways to have super-human reaction times, beyond what a human can do, even while limiting APM. So if we watch a match and see things that no human could physically do, we will know that the machine didn't win because of intelligence. It would still be great, it just would be a simplification of the problem.