[deleted]
DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
281–290 of 344 posts
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#282This 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…
Even if you don't imagine robots becoming self aware and deciding to kill humans on their own, you can imagine a fleet of drones and self-driving tanks controlled by a deep learning network. They don't need to understand what they're doing to make effective tactical decisions. If the US doesn't do this, someone else probably will. We're going to see an AI-based blitzkrieg attack in our lifetimes. Once you can launch…
> Once you can launch an invasion without losing any soldiers, war seems like a much less dangerous proposition.
Yes, but how can you stop everyone else from doing the same, if the AI part will be trivial to replicate?
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#283I 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 thought a neat way to make NPCs less dumb in games would be to let other players (internet connection required) to be the NPCs. They would have limited coverage area maybe set tasks and restrictions and let them fight a real person to move onto the next part of the game. Basically set up a queue of player and what NPC character to play and when a user gets to that part of the game where NPC needs to load, you jump…
You're storming the beaches of Normandy. You duck behind cover. Suddenly a shot rings out. You're dead. The kill cam reveals you were killed by a human-controlled enemy, standing on a seagull in the skies above. [1]
Unfortunately, humans will find advantages that shouldn't be used in any sort of game that tries to build a believable world.
That isn't to say it's a bad idea. You'd just have to design the game with human enemies in mind. I was very interested in The Crossing [2], which incorporated that of mechanic. Unfortunately, it was canceled. :(
[1] Not a made-up problem. https://youtu.be/UfZFHdywYLA
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#284Makes me wonder if any game companies have seeded empty servers with bots, acting as humans, to give their games a sense of popularity.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#285This 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…
I think you're thinking about the difference between full information games vs partial information games, rather than stateless games (the state of a starcraft game is stored on a central server, the computer just has no access to it).
There's already been excellent progress in poker AI based on traditional game theory, see http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#286Earlier 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…
To some extent it depends on the game. First person shooters can have super accurate AIs that are really frustrating to play against. Try beating the last "boss" in quake 3 on nightmare difficulty. A game like Starcraft relies much more on decision making that raw 3d math calculations and that makes making a decent AI pretty difficult without giving it advantages like extra resources or vision. That said, even though…
> First person shooters can have super accurate AIs that are really frustrating to play against.
The Worms series is also notorious for this. Their AI targeting seems to flip between "clueless" and "godlike", with very little middle ground. E.g. https://youtu.be/gqPITW04vRQ?t=1m20s
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if this would have ever been built or released if bwapi wasn't a thing.
BWAPI asked in the past, I think, and got pointed to the game's EULA, which forbids it. It may be a different thing if Google asks. Especially with a somewhat more remarkable result (AlphaGo) than "just" a bunch of student AI experiments.
[deleted]
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#288I wonder when we'll be at a point that a small, portable AI (such as the one included with games) is actually competitive with decent humans.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#289I understand the challenge, and the importance of the proof-of-principle. But again? Having done Atari games, then Go, at what point exactly does google deepmind start attacking some real world problems of consequence? Or maybe the answer is never, other companies are supposed to do the hard work? We only play games?
What real world problems do you have in mind? Games are convenient because they can be easily simulated, and you can compare the performance to expert humans.
The reinforcement learning they work on is extremely general and can be applied to many other types of problems. Particularly robot control, which is sort of the same sort of task as a video game.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#290I would love to keep a 24/7 stream open where the AI is continuously playing against the game's own bots in order to improve its playstyle.
Typically they train the AI against itself. That gives it a continuous skill gradient. Otherwise it would lose all of the games without learning anything. Since there are no successes to learn from. Or it would win all the games after it figures out how to exploit the built-in bot. With strategies that probably won't apply to humans.