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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

#241

Post by aerovistae »

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…

> 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 scene knowledge of your opponent's style.

The same is true of Go.

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

#242

Post by jdoliner »

saghm wrote: post #237
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…

Isn't it also possible that the strategies employed by top human players (e.g. deceit, having a gut feeling of what the opponent will do) could be less effective or even useless against an AI that doesn't think or act like a human player? Given how human-influenced the meta seems to be (at least, to my understanding), it seems plausible to me that this could be the case

It's quite possible that AIs will reveal completely new and different types of strategies. It's very unlikely that a concept as broad as deceit is going to be disproven though. I mean just thinking about what that would look like that would mean an AI discovered that it's actually better to show your opponent what you're doing rather than trying to mislead them. I have a hard time believing that could possible be the case.

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

#243

Post by saghm »

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…

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

On the other hand, if four people are simultaneously speaking to you, it's hard to understand all of them at once (especially if you're also talking at the same time); of course, an AI would presumably be able to communicate information much more quickly to other AIs than humans can to other humans, so limiting one to "speaking" at a time would probably not be that detrimental to them

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

#244

Post by aangjie »

seanwilson wrote: post #234
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…

> 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. Seems like they should probably tackle a game that involves strategy without micro as a stepping stone to StarCraft. Are t…

> strategy without micro as a stepping stone to StarCraft Never played StarCraft(assuming micro/tactics refers to simply continuous time based ability to give orders), but based on my experience AOE AIs, may be a game with turn-wise playing instead of continuous orders in time playing?? (for ex: battle of wesnoth)

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

#245

Post by abledon »

rcthompson wrote: post #28
Savageman wrote: post #17

That's so cool! I wish they could start doing AI for team based competitive games like League of Legends where meta-play and team decision making is important. Is that too complicated to tackle yet?

Are you imagining a single AI playing all 5 heroes on a team, or 5 independent AIs each playing a single hero with limited communication between them, or a single AI controlling a single hero on a team with 4 humans? I would say the first scenario (1 AI controlling entire team) is roughly equivalent to the the RTS case. It's just fewer units with more abilities, and character progression instead of base building. The…

AI controls one champion, maybe a bit weaker than player controlled ones.... and it controls the minions. every x wave, they can go into jungle or do other things rather than push lane

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

#246

Post by stale2002 »

patmcguire wrote: post #160
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?

There's almost certainly a bunch of timing-based micro with animations/game ticks/etc that a machine would find. For example, if a machine does a sequence of actions with sub-millisecond precision they can pop a unit into range, fire, and then pop back out again without being fired upon over and over. A lot of units would be rendered useless because it's balanced for humans. That means the units they counter would be…

Rushing is a bit of a rock paper scissors situation. You can beat a fast rush by doing a slightly slower rush that focuses more on economy, and winning via defenders advantage.

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

#247

Post by stale2002 »

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…

This is not as big of a deal you you think it is. Starcraft 2 custom AIs already exist and have existed for a long time.

And they are really bad.

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

#248

Post by seanwilson »

jdoliner wrote: post #239
seanwilson wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 scene knowledge of your opponent's style. I wouldn't be surprised if an AI comes along that shows this human perception…

Similar things weren't really said about Go or Chess. Both are perfect information games so, by definition, they can't involve deceit There's no need to try to detect subtle patterns in your opponents behavior because you have the entire game in front of you. That's not to say it's impossible but they do very much have their work cut out for them. It's an entirely different type of game that is much more difficult th…

> Similar things weren't really said about Go or Chess. Both are perfect information games so, by definition, they can't involve deceit

I took deceit to mean tricking your opponent into thinking you were doing one thing when you were actually going to do another. You can't do that in Go or Chess?

What I generally meant was maybe there's some really boring numerical number crunching or some simple mechanical algorithm that solves games like StarCraft but when humans talk about it, they talk about mind games, deceit, intimidation etc. when maybe these things are irrelevant.

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

#249

Post by stale2002 »

aerovistae wrote: post #241
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…

> 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 scene knowledge of your opponent's style. The same is true of Go.

It's not really a mind game. A mind game is like Poker. Not games of perfect information.

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

#250

Post by anchpop »

tempestn wrote: post #203
somerandomness wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Computers are capable of extremely fast control, but that doesn’t necessarily demonstrate intelligence, so agents must interact with the game within limits of human dexterity in terms of “Actions Per Minute”.'

Yes, this is definitely necessary for it to be interesting. Even so the AI will have some significant advantages over a human, in terms of being able to perfectly time events like injects, chrono boosts, etc., and watching every visible area of the minimap at once, so never being unnecessarily surprised by an attack. There are plenty of other examples. Nothing that's technically impossible for a human, but the ai wil…

Why not limit it to a certain number of keys typed per second, and a certain rate of moving the cursor? Maybe randomly wait 0-150 ms before sending a keypress to simulate human imprecision?
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