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DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

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Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#221

Post by pavel_lishin »

trjordan wrote: post #154
lordnacho wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise the AI is eventually just going to absolutely destroy humans with micro, which is not remotely interesting. If you could issue as many orders as you wanted, what would the optimal strategy be?

A big part of Starcraft is that certain units counter other units. Tanks counter zerglings, because they do splash damage to a bunch of them at once. Here's what you can do with infinite APM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs It's just broken. It's not even the same game.

A nice illustration of the potential battlefield of tomorrow.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#222

Post by imaginenore »

theptip wrote: post #122

This is pretty interesting. DeepMind’s last triumph (beating the best human Go players with AlphaGo) is impressive, but Go is a great fit for neural networks as they stand today; it’s stateless, so you can fully evaluate your position based on the state of the board at a given turn. That’s not a good fit for most real-world problems, where you have to remember something that happened in the past. E.g. the ‘fog of war…

AI already beats humans at StarCraft, not because it's smarter, but because it can control all the units simultaneously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PLplRDSgpo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgfTpU-a8D0

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#223

Post by cjbprime »

rezashirazian wrote: post #214

If DeepMind is planning on building an AI that can beat the best human SCII player, they have their work cut out for them. I'm not sure how familiar people are with StarCraft II, but at the highest levels of the game, where player have mastered the mechanics, it's a mind game fueled by deceit, sophisticated and malleable planning, detecting subtle patterns (having a good gut feeling on what's going on) and on the pro…

I agree with you -- this requires first creating the equivalent of a pro poker player, and then adding SC2 mechanics and strategy on top.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#224

Post by rezashirazian »

formula1 wrote: post #15

I suspect this will eventually lead to AI as a service for games. Rather than build a terrible AI that delays a game by months, approaching a company that can build a decent AI initially which gets better overtime would probably be ideal and create better experiences. Im curious if a startup can be built from this.

I hope it leads to that as opposed to AI as a secretary of defence.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#225

Post by stale2002 »

nogbit wrote: post #183
TulliusCicero wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice right now the AI still loses even with unlimited APM. It's just too dumb to really take advantage of its execution speed.

Buts it's intentionally dumbed down to keep the game fun, loosing all the time would get frustrating real quick. Theres no ROI for AI devs to kick the humans ass (except for maybe now with our AI/Cloud/VR/ craze).

No it is not.

People were making custom AIs for starcraft 2 since it was in beta. They can't beat any human worth their salt.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#226

Post by catshirt »

__s wrote: post #210
nazka wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that's a very interesting idea. Several models working together. Plus you limit their method of communication by being able to use the chat only. Inventing and learning new languages made by other models!

Base64 encoding of information deltas. Best chatlogs ever. Restrict controls to being halted while typing & limit characeter input, could work

restricting controls while typing is an arbitrary restriction considering they can communicate with audio asynchronously.

this brings up another interesting topic all together- which is how inefficient human language is at communicating complex ideas, quickly, with people you don't know.

that is- just like how AI has an obvious APM advantage, it also has an obvious communication advantage (raw serialization and deserialization. there is no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation).

basically, all information known by one agent will be known by all other agents in near-realtime. something humans can't do yet.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#227

Post by Houshalter »

clearf wrote: post #125
doikor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it harder to make an AI that is mediocre at playing the game vs one that is good? That is the main issue with making good AIs for games now. We want AIs (if you can call them that) that play kinda like humans but worse then the player as the player wants to win. Making an AI for game isn't about making a good AI. It is about making an AI that loses in a convincing manner. This is especially try for games like Star…

I'm not sure that accuracy/HP are the right things to tweak. I've always wanted to be "surprised," in an unscripted way, by AI enemies in FPS and RTS games.

One game experimented with smart enemy units that could sneak up on a player and attack them from behind, or outflank them. The players hated it and assumed the computer was cheating and just spawning enemies behind them.

The same is sort of true in RTS games. The new rerelease of age of empires 2 has vastly improved AI that was developed by modders. Lots of players thought it was just cheating.

But in general it has been very well received. I think players can get used to good AI. They've just been trained to expect stupid AI that cheats.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#228

Post by robryan »

vladimirralev wrote: post #218
burke wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When Google’s AI can beat a human at StarCraft, it’s time to be very afraid. I don't actually agree with this. Unlike Go, StarCraft is not only a game of strategy; "micro" (micro-managed tactics, basically) also plays a big role. An AI is going to be able to issue a LOT more commands per second than even the most skilled humans, giving them a natural tactical advantage. Strategy is more difficult for an AI, but not…

It will not get to strategy in these games at all. I can already see the AI dominating any human player just by splitting army. Imagine a terran AI dropping at 4+ places at the same time, just 4-5 marines each. This can be done within the first 6-7 minutes and no human player will be able to hold. I know they limit the APM for AI but you can easily do such drop with very few APM if you simply react fast enough on dam…

There is a lot scope for mimicking a human player in terms of how long it takes to react and how the APM is actually used. I think the more effort they put into the AI restrictions, the more interesting AI you will end up with.

Having an AI that wins because it is faster isn't very interesting.

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#229

Post by wodenokoto »

This paper is a few years old, but it gives a good overview of the problems faced when building an AI for starcraft and the methods used.

Ontanón, Santiago, et al. "A survey of real-time strategy game ai research and competition in starcraft." IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in games 5.4 (2013): 293-311.

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~cdavid/pdf/starcraft_survey.p...

Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment

#230

Post by robryan »

catshirt wrote: post #226
__s wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Base64 encoding of information deltas. Best chatlogs ever. Restrict controls to being halted while typing & limit characeter input, could work

restricting controls while typing is an arbitrary restriction considering they can communicate with audio asynchronously. this brings up another interesting topic all together- which is how inefficient human language is at communicating complex ideas, quickly, with people you don't know. that is- just like how AI has an obvious APM advantage, it also has an obvious communication advantage (raw serialization and deser…

Best would be if they had a language model, but no memory of communicating together in the past, so each game the AI would have the additional hurdle of building up communication.
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