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Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

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Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#31

Post by endtime »

jtchang wrote: post #25
endtime wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game is played at a high level, sure, but I'd call this a slight exaggeration. 1% of a player's income is less than a single worker even in the late game (when most players have around 70 workers), and a single worker kill never really makes a huge difference.

Depends when the kill is. A single worker from your initial 6? Big problem.

You can't even get a scout worker to your opponent's base before they're up to 9-10 workers or more on most maps. Anyway, killing one worker of 6 is 17% of someone's economy, not 1%.

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#33

Post by evandijk70 »

azernik wrote: post #28
frankiewarren wrote: post #20

The author stated, "Third, a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance or luck. Ideally, the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible." Do you think this is always the case? I'm thinking about texas hold 'em, which has short-term variability but the stronger players win over the long run with a better strategy. Does chance…

In Texas Hold 'Em, competitive matches are rarely decided in a single hand; rather, they are played out over many hands through the course of a day. When you average out over dozens of hands, a substantially worse player actually does have an almost zero chance of besting a superior player.

It is well known that luck plays a major role in all the big competitions in Texas Hold'em. In a field of a thousand players, the best players usually have no more than a .2% or a .3% chance of winning at the very best. (Thus the best players win 2 or 3 times more often than the average players).

For heads-up play (a match between two players), the winrate of a winning player versus a substantially worse player is can be anywhere from 4 big blinds/100 hands to 20 big blinds/100 hands. The standard deviation is more like 140 big blinds/100 hands. This means that you have to play quite a while to have an almost zero chance of winning, even against a substantially worse player. Most professional poker players even have an occasional losing month (let's say one a year an average).

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#34

Post by ido »

feral wrote: post #13
patio11 wrote: post #2

My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won. The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, an…

"Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. [...] Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defea…

    If there's a lesson here, its that strategy 
    gamers might benefit from doing some reading.
You have to play sc2 or similar games for years before that kind of advice becomes applicable (since there is so much basic skill to pick up before the game becomes that strategic), and by the time you know the game well enough to find the correct analogy to something written in The Art of War you've probably already discovered it yourself.

In short, I think there are very few if any sc2 players that would benefit (in terms of improving their game at least) from reading The Art of War.

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#35

Post by frankiewarren »

lionhearted wrote: post #27
frankiewarren wrote: post #20

The author stated, "Third, a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance or luck. Ideally, the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible." Do you think this is always the case? I'm thinking about texas hold 'em, which has short-term variability but the stronger players win over the long run with a better strategy. Does chance…

The relevant quote here is, "People don't gamble on Chess." A luck element lets players of uneven skill feel engaged. Even better is a great handicapping system like Go has, but that's notoriously hard to design. Chess is a great game at certain skill levels and has a lot of beauty to it, but games with enough of a skill difference aren't really interesting for either player unless the better player is teaching/mento…

I guess there wouldn't be any incentive for weaker players to bet if they were guaranteed to lose money every game! I find that issue with chess... I'm better than my friends (who have only played a handful of times) but get smoked online or by serious players.

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#37

Post by patio11 »

michaeldhopkins wrote: post #17
patio11 wrote: post #2

My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won. The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, an…

What's your Elo?

Suffice it to say that if this whole entrepreneurship thing doesn't work out, my odds of supporting myself through professional gaming are even worse than everyone else's.

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#38

Post by waterhouse »

patio11 wrote: post #2

My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won. The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, an…

The flip side of this is that if you are down by a little bit, you should not allow your opponent to slowly and confidently increase his advantage (unless you think he'll make little mistakes and lose the advantage; that would probably mean you're better than him, and we're probably not talking about that situation). Instead, you should force a big risky fight in which your opponent has a substantial chance of losing, if that's possible.

Along similar lines, chess grandmaster John Nunn wrote, in Secrets of Practical Chess, that when you are down, you have two basic strategies: "grim defense" and "create confusion". If you are, say, a pawn down, it may still be possible to draw if you make no mistakes; your opponent will have to work hard to force a win, and he may even get impatient and try to win quickly with a risky strategy; this is "grim defense". If that strategy is unappealing (if his advantage is simple to consolidate and exploit, or if you don't feel like slow and careful defense), then you may opt to do risky things to create complicated, high-stakes positions and hope your opponent makes a mistake; this is "create confusion".

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#39

Post by jamesturn »

fishtastic wrote: post #5
patio11 wrote: post #2

My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won. The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, an…

As someone who's been watching professional Korean SC competition for almost 10 years, the strategy described by your brother can be found from many high class players. Unlike Warcraft3 or other RTS, units in SC have very low health. Even if you have 5% more units, you can easily lose a fight within seconds from bad unit control, bad fighting position or just bad luck. It's never a good idea to attack just because yo…

For the Starcraft watcher/spectator's counterpart of the article, there is the University of Washington Starcraft spectators study: http://jeffhuang.com/Final_StarcraftSpectator_CHI11.pdf

They explain the many types of people that watch Starcraft, and that Starcraft games are fun to watch because of "Information Asymmetry"

Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.

#40

Post by jamesturn »

gcp wrote: post #15
edsrzf wrote: post #10

If I remember correctly from my college AI days, thinking about upcoming turns and minimizing your opponent's gains is called minimax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax I'm surprised that there was only one AI in the competition that did this. We were all expected to use this strategy in my class. Once everybody's figured this out, it becomes a game of: - Who can think ahead the most turns? - Who has the best "am…

I agree, the Mancala backstory sounds quite strange and unbelievable. To me it looks like it's made up (maybe partly on some vague recollection of the author) to serve as an introduction for the rest of the article. The behavior of AI programming winning by 1 point does exist in real life for Monte-Carlo based agents calculating winning probabilities. You can see it in computer go games.

Researchers from Berkeley developed a fairly good Starcraft AI engine that combined micro-management, pathing, and overally strategy to win the Starcraft AI competition: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-...
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