The StarCraft 1 BroodWar AI scene has been thriving for a few years now: https://sscaitournament.com/
You can watch 24/7 live AI vs AI games on Twitch at: https://www.twitch.tv/sscait
Support for voting on who to play next and even a betting system are in place, too. For those who wish to get their feet wet with BW AI development, here are the Java / C++ tutorials: https://sscaitournament.com/index.php?action=tutorial
DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
261–270 of 283 posts
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#262I also want to see the algorithm win on unorthodox maps. Perhaps a map they have never seen before, or one where the map is the same as before but the resources have moved. Don't tell the player or the algorithm this, and see how both react, and adapt. This tells us a great deal about the resiliency of abilities.
I am considering a random map generator for just this reason.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#263The StarCraft 1 BroodWar AI scene has been thriving for a few years now: https://sscaitournament.com/ You can watch 24/7 live AI vs AI games on Twitch at: https://www.twitch.tv/sscait Support for voting on who to play next and even a betting system are in place, too. For those who wish to get their feet wet with BW AI development, here are the Java / C++ tutorials: https://sscaitournament.com/index.php?action=tutoria…
Some thoughts and analysis on why Starcraft AI by one of the active AI developers Dan:
https://dangant.com/2017/08/09/why-starcraft-ai/
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure positions of units are essentially floats? Given how the units seem to arrange themselves (from what I see), I would guess that it's not close to the full range of floats, and instead there are just a few fractional pixel locations that units snap to. This is just a guess however. -- If this is the case though, the space could be represented by taking larger integer values (say, a magnitude of 1 or 2 hig…
Buildings snap to a grid. Units take up space according to a hitbox. Hitbox size varies according to each type of unit (E.g. Thors are huge). This becomes important when dealing with AoE. Consider a group of mutalisks. If you select-all and issue an attack-command or move-command, the mutalisks will bunch up tight and then disperse. Cf a video on the "magic-box technique". So I wouldn't be surprised if position-value…
I haven't looked at SC2 specifically, but would be surprised if they were floats; I sometimes read game dev blogs and RTSs on average tend to be implemented using int/fixed-point based positioning, to eliminate floating point imprecision as a source of multiplayer sync issues.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#265A 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…
Actions per minute (APM) could be limited to a max of 100.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> SC2 got rid of a lot of that You think so? My impression is that SC2 had a lot more of repetitive tasks you had to do. E.g. wall off the ramp, send a worker scouting, ... and you have to perform certain actions every X seconds (like using chrono boost). A lot or mastering the game is rote learning, and polishing a build order. Another big part is constantly scouting and reacting to what the enemy is doing. Due to t…
I think the idea of spending to upgrade your helper AI sounds really interesting and potentially novel, but it's important to push back a little bit on the idea of "removing all the rote" from an RTS. day[9] (ex Broodwar pro, current caster of many games) probably makes the argument better than I can here: https://youtu.be/EP9F-AZezCU?t=55 , but one of the important implications of having repetitive aspects in an RTS…
It would just be a game for a different audience, casual vs. pro-gamer. Now casual sounds nasty and makes you think of candy crush - god forbid... I mean somebody who plays as a hobby, sometimes in the evening, but doesn't train for the game. For one, I can't put in the hours required anymore with a full-time job and a family. For another, the way we used to play RTSs (~2000) on small LANs was very different. Still competitive, but somehow more relaxed. Exactly this "managing your attention" aspect was missing, so the early game was more like a building strategy game, and the late game was less paper-scissor-stone and more about outwitting your enemy.
I think SC2 is fine as it is, for what it is. I would not want to take that away from anybody in a potential version 3; but I think there is space for a more casual game in the StarCraft universe, thus "SC2.5".
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> SC2 got rid of a lot of that You think so? My impression is that SC2 had a lot more of repetitive tasks you had to do. E.g. wall off the ramp, send a worker scouting, ... and you have to perform certain actions every X seconds (like using chrono boost). A lot or mastering the game is rote learning, and polishing a build order. Another big part is constantly scouting and reacting to what the enemy is doing. Due to t…
> You think so? It's an absolute fact. Here are a few things that reduced the necessary repetitive action count considerably compared to SC1: 1. Larger control groups 2. Worker queues (including sending them to the resource patches) 3. Smart casting (no longer have to select individual units to correctly chain cast certain AOE spells) 4. Pathfinding actually works now so no need to click 15 times to get a unit where…
> Oh, I see. So you never played competitively?
Almost only in LANs, not un-competitively, but not "professionally" and not in ladders. I was more of a Counter-Strike dude when it came to competitive play.
I find the characters of the games very different, and the difference might be LAN vs BattleNet rather than SC1/BW vs SC2 (although Blizzard did emphasize certain aspects more in SC2).
I never played SC1 with contorted arms, frantically hitting the keyboard, nervously checking my production buildings. It was more like, lets build a pretty base, and then settle the age old question: Battlecruisers or Carriers?
I don't think I've even seen a wall-off. We probably would have laughed at how ridiculous it was to misuse a building like that, especially since you couldn't lower your supply depots.
Sometimes we would have ridiculous battles over secondary bases - in modern play, you would punish a player who overextends and go to their base, but back then that would have killed the fun. While you might have won, you would have been considered a spoilsport.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#268Can we have an AlphaGo tournament with the StarCraft II AI, where pros fight the bot, lose horribly, and make them question their life decisions?
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#269[deleted]
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment
#270It's a bit too bad they're having to move towards supervised learning and imitation learning.
I totally understand why they need to do that given the insane decision trees, but I was really hoping to see what the AI would learn to do without any human example, simply because it would be inhuman and interesting.
I'm really interested in particular if an unsupervised AI would use very strange building placements and permanently moving ungrouped units.
One thing that struck me in the video was the really actively weird mining techniques in one clip and then another clip where it blocked its mineral line with 3 raised depots...