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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

#201

Post by gradys »

Impossible wrote: post #150
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…

Minor nitpick, video games running on digital computers are by definition still discrete even if they feel continuous. Networked multiplayer wouldn't be possible in RTS games if that wasn't the case. The granularity of unit positions and turns in Starcraft obviously leads to a much larger state space, so I get what you're saying, for AI its effectively continuous.

They're discrete with such high cardinality that successful approaches will likely model them assuming they're basically continuous. Neural network layer activations are also discrete after all, but they're often 256+ dimensional vectors of float32s or float16s.

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

#202

Post by uw_rob »

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…

> And SlayerS isn't a player, it's a team name.

I think the parent comment is fair. At MLG Anaheim in 2011 SlayerS unleashed their TvZ blue flame build and slaughtered with it. Blizzard nerfed it pretty hard fairly shortly after it. 3 of top 4 were SlayerS and they almost excessively used that build against Zerg. http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/2011_MLG_Pro_Circuit/A... http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/news/anaheim-starcraft-2-re...

As a Zerg player at the time, I remember the frustration of having to deal with that.

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

#203

Post by taneq »

Impossible wrote: post #150
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…

Minor nitpick, video games running on digital computers are by definition still discrete even if they feel continuous. Networked multiplayer wouldn't be possible in RTS games if that wasn't the case. The granularity of unit positions and turns in Starcraft obviously leads to a much larger state space, so I get what you're saying, for AI its effectively continuous.

If you're gonna be like that, our 'real' universe may well be discrete given that there are minimum possible lengths and time intervals.

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

#204

Post by jtolmar »

littlestymaar wrote: post #187
qub1t wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This comment in insightful, thanks ! > 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…

The preferred opening for Protoss in PvZ (on most maps) is the forge fast-expand. If the Zerg player doesn't want to play an economic game in response, they have a variety of all-in strategies available. There is a lengthy article on Team Liquid about how Protoss should respond to these.

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Protoss_Counter_to_Zerg...

What I'd note here is that:

1. It's a rather long list.

2. Good scouting is required for most of these situations.

3. There are terrain-based considerations all over the place.

4. There are considerations based on how many units were lost in earlier engagements all over the place.

Enumerating all the build orders (#1) is pretty easy (as you said, build order space isn't that big), but the interaction between terrain and building placement (#3) is a lot more complex and starts to interact with the full game's massive search space more, and the followups are dynamic (#2, #4) so I don't think the game will degenerate into a solved solution as long as it looks anything like regular play.

It's possible that there's some degenerate micro-based solution that turns everything on its head, of course. Bot-based vulture micro might rewrite part of the Terran matchups, but it doesn't seem insurmountable yet. My own bot gets units across the map 5% to 10% faster than normal, but that doesn't look like enough to break the game even with a 4pool.

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

#205

Post by taneq »

vmasto wrote: post #91
pavedwalden wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. Most actions in idle game mode (i.e. when there's no active battle, micro or macro to be done) are null, the gamers simply repeat random meaningless keystrokes; this helps with being always alert and ready for anything that requires a rapid response. An AI doesn't need to do this. Source: Ex pro Starcraft (Brood War) gamer.

> this helps with being always alert and ready for anything that requires a rapid response.

I always wondered why they do that, just spam meaningless things like open/close the stats window or click on the background. Some WoW PVPers did it too (like Laintime, I think it was - played a warrior and ran around spamming the character window open/closed an mashing 'weapon swap' even when there was no earthly reason to do so). I figured it was just the result of too much caffeine for 18 hours a day.

This sounds like it's more an equivalent of tennis players' dancing/hopping around, or martial artists doing their ducking/weaving thing?

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

#206

Post by albinofrenchy »

gradys wrote: post #198
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 think a big component is not really machine learning but more related to how to represent state at any given time, which will necessarily involve a lot of human-tweaking of distilling down what really are the important things that influence winning. I agreed with everything you said until here. Developing good representations of state is precisely what today's machine learning is so good at. This is the key contrib…

I'd argue modern AI is sort of terrible at taking high dimensional data and finding an effective representation of it. It works better than a lot of other methods in ML but as far as I know pure reinforcement learning applications are sort of lack luster, and even dimensionality reduction success stories tend to rely on scrubbed, careful data treatment by people.

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

#207

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

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…

I'd say we're certainly going to see crazy advanced cheese strats - ones that humans wouldn't be able to hope to pull off. This could definitely be done with computer micro and wouldn't be defendable with human micro.

An example would be moving probes around in such a way to maximize their shield regen - or switching the top clickable unit while stacked - who knows...

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by aerovistae »

popcorncolonel wrote: post #101
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.

Why not first allow the AI to have unlimited APM and beat humans, then restrict it later? Because I don't think we're even close to the easier problem.

In what universe is taking 10,000 actions per minute an easier problem for a neural net than 100 such actions?

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

#210

Post by aerovistae »

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…

I mean, the techniques developed through such a research project would map onto many other domains, obviously including any other RTS.

Using SC2 as a starting point isn't really of much consequence. "Too late"? It's not as if the algorithms developed will die alongside the game.

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