DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by Retric » Sat, Nov 05, 2016, 3:18 AM UTC

tyrust wrote: post #212

stouset wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the game wasn't balanced for the possibility of infinite micro, I think it's highly probable that there's a globally optimal strategy.

Could you give an example of what that might look like?

Void rays are countered by AOE anti air. With infinite APM there is no need for two rays to be hit by the same aoe. Further AOE tends to do less direct dammage, so VR with infante APM may hard counter a lot more unit types than intended. IMO, the risk is more from something like blink stalkers becoming insanely resource efficient.

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

#262

Post by pmyjavec » Sat, Nov 05, 2016, 3:19 AM UTC

dguaraglia wrote: post #26

treehau5 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so sick of this argument. How about we have a spine for once and say no?

How is 'saying no' going to stop the military of this or any other country from doing it? How do you measure the disadvantage we'd be at by not allowing our military to do it, but letting other militaries (over which we have no control) do it? Having a spine has nothing to do with it.

So, basically another arms race to the bottom, similar to nuclear warheads ? 1940s thinking with 2016 technology. I hear what you're saying but not all progress is good progress.

The limits of our ability to think a global scale are an issue, we still have a tribe mentality, this discussion demonstrates that. "The Chinese, The British etc"

We still think in terms of tribes, but we have technology change the world. Until we evolve some more we're probably not fit to wield more and more powerful weapons.

It would be good if we could stop worrying about weaponry all together and focus on real issues like deforestation, poverty, pollution of the sea, climate change etc.

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

#263

Post by nickpsecurity » Sat, Nov 05, 2016, 3:23 AM UTC

ygra wrote: post #197

headcanon wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, but my guess is that Starcraft AI's are really good at Macro play (building the right units and tech trees), but at the upper levels of SC players win or lose in Micro play (specific positioning of units), which is much harder for an AI to accomplish well, since there are a lot of little tricks. Basically, Macro can be programmed easily, but Micro requires the player to respond creatively. http://wiki.tea…

It's actually the other way around, I'd say. Individual unit control follows very naturally when you have unlimited APM. And most of the time you can define simple and good criteria on how to position the units (e.g. concave, or exactly the right distance apart to avoid splash damage, or one unit a tiny bit more towards the enemy to be the first one targeted by incoming fire, ...). Build orders can be programmed, yes…

The ones I saw in the competitions lost against humans on such micro rules since the humans quickly intuited their blind spots. The ability to bluff and screw with AI's, a human strong point, is what made me predict Starcraft was going to be way harder than Go. I'm still betting on the human in this one.

And the last line you said is also true to make things even more difficult. :)

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

#264

Post by halflings » Sat, Nov 05, 2016, 3:29 AM UTC

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…

What you're describing is called "kiting", and is already being done by regular players (not to mention the pros). It is only possible for some combinations of units, for example Marines with stimpack vs regular zerglings ("slowlings"), or Viking vs Void Ray because one unit needs to be fast enough to be able to shoot + move out of range before being shot.

Here's the type of micro pro players can do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrAlhk98WxE±

They do say that they will limit the number of actions taken by the AI to focus on building a smart and strategic AI instead of learning gimmicky micro moves, but if one thing is sure, it's that even the best micro cannot win a StarCraft game if the macro is not on point, and bad choices are made (good luck micro-ing siege tanks against a swarm host!)

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

#265

Post by halflings » Sat, Nov 05, 2016, 3:33 AM UTC

rlayton2 wrote: post #162

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?

Infinite micro? I'd just send all drones/probes/SCVs directly to the human's base and kill their drones. The extra drones that the human has wouldn't be able to make up the difference.

This is already an infamous strategy (worker rush) and it os easily countered as long as you have all your workers united and attack at once (not much micro can be done at that point, and the numerical advantage trumps that... unless you're playing protoss and constantly trying to replenish shields, and still!).

Also, I'm pretty sure this is not something that DeepMind would do to "solve intelligence".

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

#266

Post by tempestn » Sat, Nov 05, 2016, 3:40 AM UTC

halflings wrote: post #260

anchpop wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What "somerandomness" what pointing out is that nobody in this thread seems to have actually clicked on the link. DeepMind's article clearly states that they would limit the number of actions per minute (traditionally referred to as APM in esports) taken by their AI, yet people are still saying that this wouldn't be impressive because the machine has an unlimited number of actions.

My post (the grandparent to yours) fully acknowledges that. However, there are many different things that count as an action in starcraft, and even with a cap on APM, there will be many ways for a computer to pack in more useful actions than a human. Also a computer will have other innate advantages, like perfect timing and map awareness. An equally skilled human will therefore need stronger strategy to make up for these disadvantages. Your parent post appears to suggest mitigating these other advantages in various ways (although I don't personally agree with that approach, since the computer isn't doing something that's out of reach for humans, just things that aren't practical for humans to achieve consistently).

If you did NOT limit APM, it wouldn't even be a contest. The AI could simply mass first tier units and crush any human opponent with micro.

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

#267

Post by seanwilson » Sat, Nov 05, 2016, 3:42 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #254

seanwilson wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Deceit boils down to assuming your opponent will misjudge the situation and make a mistake. In Chess or Go, computer players choose the best move assuming that the opponent won't make any mistakes (will never be fooled). There's no attempt to model a weaker opponent. This is why computer players in Go tend to fall apart when they start losing. They don't see a path to victory against a perfect opponent, so all moves…

> In Chess or Go, computer players choose the best move assuming that the opponent won't make any mistakes (will never be fooled). There's no attempt to model a weaker opponent.

What I meant was there's no reason an AI couldn't try to fool a human in a perfect information context. For example, you could bait a (probably not world class though) opponent into capturing a piece which puts them in a bad position, where certain baits are more likely to work on humans than others. There's plenty of situations in real life where two people have the same information but one comes out on top because the other overlooked a detail.

> This is why computer players in Go tend to fall apart when they start losing. They don't see a path to victory against a perfect opponent, so all moves look the same.

Is this not a limitation of the AI though instead of something inherent to AI?

> A Go AI that can win from behind (given a handicap) might be an interesting challenge.

I'm sure some Go AI are trained doing this.

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

#268

Post by kleigenfreude » Sat, Nov 05, 2016, 3:50 AM UTC

First we teach it Atari games, and now strategy and war?

Why not give it lots of data to solve real problems? Training it on useless games will have no benefit.

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

#269

Post by YokoZar » Sat, Nov 05, 2016, 4:02 AM UTC

halflings wrote: post #260

anchpop wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What "somerandomness" what pointing out is that nobody in this thread seems to have actually clicked on the link. DeepMind's article clearly states that they would limit the number of actions per minute (traditionally referred to as APM in esports) taken by their AI, yet people are still saying that this wouldn't be impressive because the machine has an unlimited number of actions.

Clicking the same button twice in a row in rapid succession is much easier for a human to do than clicking two small buttons on different parts of the screen. A naive counter of "actions per minute" would count both things as exactly the same number of actions.

Whenever the harder action is better than the simpler one, the AI would gain an intrinsic advantage even though it's limited to the same number of APM.

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

#270

Post by halflings » Sat, Nov 05, 2016, 4:13 AM UTC

tempestn wrote: post #266

halflings wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "somerandomness" what pointing out is that nobody in this thread seems to have actually clicked on the link. DeepMind's article clearly states that they would limit the number of actions per minute (traditionally referred to as APM in esports) taken by their AI, yet people are still saying that this wouldn't be impressive because the machine has an unlimited number of actions.

My post (the grandparent to yours) fully acknowledges that. However, there are many different things that count as an action in starcraft, and even with a cap on APM, there will be many ways for a computer to pack in more useful actions than a human. Also a computer will have other innate advantages, like perfect timing and map awareness. An equally skilled human will therefore need stronger strategy to make up for t…

I do not understand the point of an AI if you want it to be equal in all ways to a human. Why not just fight a human?

The goal is to build an AI that is at least as good as pro players (which would involve building models and technology capable of taking complex decisions etc.). The goal was never to implement something that is strictly equal to a human.

You cannot blame the AI for having a better memory and perfect timing, or next thing you know you'll ask them to limit the RAM to something comparable to the memory in a human brain and use older processors to restrict the unfair advantage current computation clusters have.

Regarding your last point: even without limiting APM, there is no AI that can currently compete with decent players . If it was as easy as you say, people would've done that with Broodwar which has open APIs. The fact is that micro alone cannot win a StarCraft game. Perfectly micro-ed zerglings cannot do much against a terran turtling behind a closed wall and shooting with marines, or a protoss with immortals and adepts.