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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

#291

Post by keerthiko »

shannonpig wrote: post #285
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…

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/ .

It's not just the limited information space, however. There's also the solution space or "action space". A poker game-space is quite narrow compared to that of StarCraft because of pixel-wise differences. This is the main reason that makes StarCraft "much more realistic". In real life you have infinite moves and options with (almost) analog differences, whereas a game like Poker is much more discrete. Go is somewhere in between.

For instance, as any protoss player knows this all too well, a Zealot placed a mere pixel away from where it should could allow a stream of zerglings in, completely throwing any game plan you had up to that point out the window and enter crisis management mode. Usually this is a "mistake", which a computer may never make, but it needs to learn the relevance of such pixel-sized mistakes, which is unlikely to have as much of an impact in a poker game or Go game as it would in StarCraft.

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

#292

Post by otempomores »

stouset wrote: post #233
tyrust wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just on the surface, these sorts of games are notoriously difficult to balance properly. Someone discovers a strategy that tips the balance, and units/abilities/whatever have to get nerfed. The odds that there's a stable balance at a level of play not actively tested (e.g., infinite APM) are extremely low. One example is a sibling post's video of 100 zerglings against 20 siege tanks. For humans, the zerglings are cap…

There is a lua widget in spring rts that allows for units with at least one farsighted unit to automatically stay out of los. Sneaky army will wriggle through all defense lines.

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

#293

Post by otempomores »

YokoZar wrote: post #269
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.

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.

Player attention as a ressource modeling. Ai will abandon battles that are no longer cost efficient much earlier

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

#294

Post by Tinyyy »

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…

What about scissors paper stone? An AI can be trained to have >50% odds against a human player, given a copious amount of games. Humans have predictable patterns and they can definitely be exploited.

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

#295

Post by astrobe_ »

luka-birsa wrote: post #8

Anybody else sees a problem with training the AI to move troops around a battlefield, with the purpose to exterminate the opponent?

You should be more scared of the AI that tracks, profiles, predicts and influences you.

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

#296

Post by otempomores »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #221
trjordan wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Privat third in first row you ve been ai selected to draw splash damage for king and cuntry. Everybody else give him some privacy

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

#297

Post by tempestn »

halflings wrote: post #270
tempestn wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you. As I said,

> 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).

As far as your last paragraph, I suspect the issue is that people building AIs generally try to follow the spirit of the game. I believe it would be possible write an AI that wins by perfectly macroing out tier-1 units, rushing, and perfectly microing them (and obviously it would be much easier than to build a more general Starcraft AI). If it hasn't been done, I expect that's because it would be little more than a gimmick. It certainly wouldn't be any fun to play against, nor would it advance AI in general.

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

#298

Post by [deleted] »

lordnacho wrote: post #139
arcticfox wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I think you'd have to limit that machine's APM to somewhere around the human limit, and make it choose which actions it wants to spend its time on. Otherwise the AI is eventually just going to absolutely destroy humans with micro, which is not remotely interesting. We've known transistors were faster than fingers for ages.

> 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?

[deleted]

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

#299

Post by Maro »

Thaxll wrote: post #149
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?

Simple example would be in combat, like being always out of range ect ... Imagine one army where every single unit is controlled by one human. Each individual unit would be very very strong.

> Imagine one army where every single unit is controlled by one human. Each individual unit would be very very strong.

Like a real army :)

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

#300

Post by TeMPOraL »

halflings wrote: post #270
tempestn wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

Well, if you want just an AI to win with humans, you can stick to playing chess - nowadays the AI can drunk-walk its way to victory through the game tree faster than humans can make leaps in strategic thinking. The point of such experiment here is to impose limits on what an AI can do in order to cancel out "trivial" advantages it has, so that the challenge for AI developers will be to improve the core of strategic thinking & planning. Victory by perfect micro is not interesting[0]. Neither is victory by perfect macro. You need to curtail the avenues which would let the AI win by executing utterly dumb strategies with machine-like precision if you want the AI to develop smart strategies.

TL;DR: because humans are not programmable, so they cannot be rapidly improved ;).

[0] - except as an art piece.

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