This is dangerous. Overmind will come to life.
The UC Berkeley AI for Brood War (designed for the 2010 AIIDE StarCraft competition) was literally named the Berkeley Overmind.
DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
71–80 of 344 posts
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#72I 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.
the real question of course would be how to train the AI to have varying levels of "expertise" (ie: penalize if score is too high)
For realtime games, maybe just add a little forced think-time for each action? You could even adjust that dynamically
it's necessary anyway to prevent it from having godlike micro.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#73I 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.
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…
I think it's really important to realize is that a game AI isn't really there to try to win, or maybe even to "convincingly" beat you the same way a human is. Perhaps you could train an AI to make the game more "fun", but that's pretty hard to measure and people are so different. It's a really hard optimization process.
One commonality, it seems, is that players want to get better at the game. Perhaps, an AI that TEACHES the user to improve their play, and reduce errors would be an easier problem. So far we mostly do this using heuristics of gradually increasing difficulty, but it should really depend on what the player is weakest at... and what the user can improve at fastest! That is something nicely measurable, which you might use to train an AI.
Then, if/when people play against other human players they are as strong as they can be... often an FPS goal.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#74That's great.
AIs on SC1 relied on many hacks. Initially I thought that DeepMind was going to create a bot for the original SC.
I hope some of the advances in SC2 AI can be integrated into the in-game AI. e.g: a trained neural network that plays better than the "hard" AI, but can run on a consumer box and not on a massive cluster.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's going to happen anyway. I think we are better off doing such things in the open and having some visibility into it rather than be surprised when something happens.
I'm so sick of this argument. How about we have a spine for once and say no?
Good luck convincing South Korea, Japan, India, the EU, Britain, Australia, Canada....
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#76Does anyone know of any resources for someone looking to learn more about Game AI for real time strategy games?
The Berkeley Overmind was designed for a 2010 Brood War competition. The website (http://overmind.cs.berkeley.edu/), although no longer updated, still contains many videos and links to articles that describe the internals of the AI and the design process. The Ars Technica article in particular goes quite in depth.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's probably no reason to restrict the computer the below human pro players (200-300 APM). My guess is the engine just wasn't designed with superhuman APM in mind and could be exploited. If that's the case then the AI would in some sense not really be playing the same game as the humans.
An apm limit is needed because impossibly high APM results in stupid strategies that the game wasn't designed for. The point is to build ai that compete with humans using human strategies. Not to cheese with borked game mechanic exploits.
In practice right now the AI still loses even with unlimited APM. It's just too dumb to really take advantage of its execution speed.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#78This would be so much more fun with a turn-based game where speed isn't a variable, like Civilization. I'd love to play against several AIs that were better than me because of code, not because they get a bunch of extra in-game bonuses. With a nice AI API, you could have online competitions where AIs battled every month.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#79I 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.
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…
I think it's about options for players, some are strong others fresh and both want to choose an AI to their likings. Sometimes they are in the mood to get beat maybe to learn new tactics and occasionally just a victim to fight frustration.
What wrong with a strength option? I'd include an unbeatable entry in any case.
Re: DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
#80Looks like they are going to limit the APM of the AI. I wonder how they are going to decide the limit? I've never played StarCraft, but from what I understand very high APM is needed to play the game at the highest levels.
There's probably no reason to restrict the computer the below human pro players (200-300 APM). My guess is the engine just wasn't designed with superhuman APM in mind and could be exploited. If that's the case then the AI would in some sense not really be playing the same game as the humans.
Superhuman APM makes it a really different game. Current Starcraft AIs can do thousands of commands per second. That means that essentially each unit has its own AI and can act independently of all the other units. There's almost no delay between different unit commands.
Unlimited APM makes AI much less interesting from the perspective of game theory.
Think of it like a robotic boxer, except instead of an android, they build two 30 foot long walls of spring-loaded boxing gloves that close in on the human boxer. Yes, the robot punches the guy a lot, so the problem seems "solved" but it isn't really.