by nijynot on 8/9/17, 5:10 PM with 270 comments
by qub1t on 8/9/17, 7:27 PM
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 harder problem than go. Not to mention that the game itself is more complex, in the sense that go, despite being a very hard game for humans to master, is composed of a few very simple and well defined rules. Starcraft is much more open-ended, has many more rules, and as a result its much harder to build a representation of game state that is conducive to effective deep learning.
I do think that eventually we will get an AI that can beat humans, but it will be a non-trivial problem to solve, and it may take some time to get there. I think a big component is not really machine learning but more related to how to represent state at any given time, which will necessarily involve a lot of human-tweaking of distilling down what really are the important things that influence winning.
by dpflan on 8/9/17, 6:03 PM
> Article: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02139
> Github: https://github.com/TorchCraft/StarData
by siegecraft on 8/9/17, 5:47 PM
by hitekker on 8/9/17, 7:10 PM
Starcraft 2 is at its twilight.
The biggest leagues of South Korea have disbanded. [1] The prolific progamers who transitioned to Starcraft 2 have gone back to Broodwar. [2]
Blizzard itself has scrubbed all references to Starcraft 2 on the very home page of Starcraft. [3] Except for the twitter embed, it has only only one "2" character... in the copyright statement.
My take is that the future for the Starcraft franchise will be through remastered and potential expansion packs following it.
Starcraft 2 had a good run but, with the entire RTS genre stagnating [4], I don't think Blizzard wants to bet on anything less than the top horse.
[1] https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/10/the-end-of-an-era-for-star...
[2] http://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/18935988/starcraft-br...
[4]http://www.pcgamer.com/the-decline-evolution-and-future-of-t... (Aside from MOBAs)
by SiempreZeus on 8/9/17, 7:30 PM
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...
by arcanus on 8/9/17, 5:50 PM
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.
by ktRolster on 8/9/17, 5:46 PM
We already know that computers can have superior micro and beat humans at Starcraft through that(1). Is DeepMind going to win by giving themselves a micro advantage that is beyond what reasonable humans can do?
(1)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs as one example
by daemonk on 8/9/17, 5:50 PM
by arnioxux on 8/9/17, 8:10 PM
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1v5mqg/using_b...
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Arbitrary_code_execu...
Is this how we are going to accidentally let AGI loose into the world!? /s
On a more realistic note I think this will degenerate into a game of who can fuzz test for the best game breaking glitch. Think of all the programming bugs that turned into game mechanics in BW that we haven't discovered for SC2 yet: http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-h...
by krasi0 on 8/10/17, 2:43 PM
by siliconc0w on 8/9/17, 8:39 PM
by Havoc on 8/9/17, 5:55 PM
by convefefe on 8/10/17, 8:27 PM
by Companion on 8/10/17, 8:25 PM
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...
by hacker_9 on 8/9/17, 8:19 PM
by JabavuAdams on 8/10/17, 9:11 PM
So then BWAPI came along ... and ... AI is hard. The best SCBW bots are still pretty pathetic compared to a human player, never mind an expert human player.
by Ntrails on 8/10/17, 9:25 AM
Is it possible that training on diamond players is less effective than training on, say, silver? Is that actually even an interesting thing to look at?
by ipnon on 8/9/17, 5:43 PM
by naveen99 on 8/9/17, 7:45 PM
Then, why not release code for the built in ai, and improve on it ? Or is the built in ai cheating ?
by captn3m0 on 8/10/17, 12:48 AM
by toisanji on 8/9/17, 5:55 PM
by DefNotARogueAI on 8/9/17, 7:59 PM
by onorton on 8/10/17, 8:48 AM
by blobbers on 8/9/17, 7:12 PM
--why are there not more fanboy comments?!
by JefeChulo on 8/9/17, 6:23 PM
I am really glad they are limiting APM because otherwise things just get stupid.
by Lambent on 8/10/17, 8:35 PM
Keep in mind there's been an amateur AI project for broodwar for almost 7 years now. Even after such a long learning period, the games are very primitive, and the AI's still couldn't pose a threat to even a beginner human player. Sometimes the games take hours. Trying to build strategy and decision making into an AI is incredibly complicated. There have been teams working at the SSCAIT for many years now, and the product is still fairly primitive.
So what CA did was instead write up a simpler AI that mimics strategy and decision making. We all know it's not great, but I'd be really skeptical that 3rd parties would magically create an AI that can think strategically.
by Outrageous on 8/10/17, 8:29 PM