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I think the Starcraft pros tend to think about what separates top pros from mediocre pros. They see these things, like better 'mind games', as what makes Starcr

I think the Starcraft pros tend to think about what separates top pros from mediocre pros. They see these things, like better 'mind games', as what makes Starcraft hard. The thing is, a game needs to be very carefully balanced for these scissor/paper/rock dynamics to emerge. This type of balance is not the default --- it's the product of careful design, and empirical tuning. In human vs AI, this balance will almost surely be broken. The AI will have perfect control, even with APM constraints. Its attention can be split between two attacks perfectly. It won't play at all like a human. So, the resulting human vs AI gameplay is unlikely to be strategically deep. If the AI can learn to play Starcraft at all competently, it will probably crush. It will probably find a dominant strategy that it can re-execute exactly the same every time, which the human can't stop. Making the AI work well for Starcraft will be very difficult. In Chess and Go the actions are discrete; in Starcraft the actions are all analog. But the gameplay requires much deeper search than the Atari games Deepmind learned in its early paper. So I think the game will be very difficult for the AI. But not for the reasons people are talking about.

bad_user 11y ago
Being able to have multiple battles at the same time is not terribly interesting, because humans can scale this as well. Team up two humans and they'll be able to do twice the work. Teaming two players to play a Go or a chess game against a computer wouldn't do that much good though. I've recently read Ender's Game and there was an interesting idea in there. In the book it is hive queens controlling the Buggers fleet with exquisite control, yet Ender is able to exploit this as a weakness, as every human is a sentient being capable of thinking and acting independently, so as a commander he was only giving high-level orders to his lieutenants and they did the rest. Which is how humans have fought wars.
- Retric 11y ago
  Things happened in Enders Game due to authorial fiat nothing more. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L4_zFYnnn2Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L4_zFYnnn2Y Game designers spend a lot of effort in RTS game keeping the AI from crushing people. This showes up not just in the games AI but also unit mechanics. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mHbloVZ15Pc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mHbloVZ15Pc
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    Actually RTS AI is really bad and they almost all cheat to keep up with the player.
    - Retric 11y ago
      Having an AI that plays like a human is less fun. 'Cheating' is simply how developers can easily balance things. EX: Often there are units capable of infinite harassment with perfect micro. That's so far from being fun it's never part of actual game AI. Large base, small waves. It's a simple formula that makes people feel great! PS: Of course it goes deeper, units need to have basic AI because people can't micro manage large numbers.
      - Houshalter 11y ago
        I know, but there are even competitions where people write RTS AIs that can do micro like that, and humans still often beat them. Some game developers have great lengths to make good RTS AI that plays fair and like a human, and they are still easy to beat for skilled players.
- erelde 11y ago
  But that's not the case here, in most Starcraft tournaments it's 1v1. So it would be one 1 AI mounting serveral attacks at the same time against one humain player with the limitations it entails.
- realharo 11y ago
  If you team up two humans, they need to be very well coordinated to work together effectively, otherwise they'll just get in each other's way. Starcraft 2 has a mode like this called Archon Mode, where two players control the same units. The conflicts that can arise from this can be pretty fun to witness.
  - cmdrfred 11y ago
    It appears the starcraft developers had the same conversation we are having here.
  - duskwuff 11y ago
    A similar mode was present in the original Starcraft, albeit without the cool name. (It was simply called "team melee".)
    - hobarrera 11y ago
      No, it's a completely different thing. In Archon Mode, two physical players share control of a single in-game player. A lot more coordination is required or they'll both be giving counter-orders most of the time.
      - duskwuff 11y ago
        It's been a long time since I played team melee, and I've never played Starcraft 2 multiplayer, but reading back, I'm pretty sure they're the exact same thing: http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Team_Melee http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Team_Melee http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Archon_Mode http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Archon_Mode https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/314e28/archon_mode_vs_team_melee/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/314e28/archon_mo...
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  > I've recently read Ender's Game and there was an interesting idea in there. In the book it is hive queens controlling the Buggers fleet with exquisite control, yet Ender is able to exploit this as a weakness, as every human is a sentient being capable of thinking and acting independently, so as a commander he was only giving high-level orders to his lieutenants and they did the rest. Which is how humans have fought wars. I've read enough about real-world military strategy on Quora to know that this is nonsense. The amount of national resources that go into command and control networks is immense, these networks play a huge role in making our military unassailable. Something like the Bugger hive queens would be practically impossible to deal with in any real way, deception would be impossible to rely on. Deception is critical in an invasion, defenders have the advantage of knowing the terrain. If you could rely on a sensor network to reliably and instantaneously tell you where all the threats are, then you could simply rely on mobile forces to go wherever they're needed. Unless the attackers have an overwhelming numerical advantage, they won't be able to break through. D-Day would not have been feasible without the ability to deceive the Germans as to which beaches they were going to land the troops, a lot of time and effort went into planning that deception. Humans only stood a chance against the buggers due to their overwhelming weaponry, which will trump tactics and strategy every time. No way with that kind of weaponry would it even be a fair fight, any mildly competent general could have won with that advantage. The defensive response to overwhelming conventional superiority is guerrilla warfare, not trying to stand and fight toe-to-toe with nukes. Felt like a bit of a cop-out to me, authors should be required to spend some time on Quora verifying their basic assumptions, it would make for much better stories. Naturally Card didn't have access to it, and I still enjoyed the book. But it could have been much much better.
  - na85 11y ago
    .... Quora being known the world over as an elite military strategy academy, of course.
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
      I ignored Quora for a long time, but once I took a look at it, it quickly became a valued part of my life. I've been on lots of Internet fora over the years, Quora really nails the problem of signal-noise ratio you typically get with forums, even HN isn't immune. I've learned more about the real world around us from Quora than I have from almost every other source. Only Stratfor rivals it, and that's only in the realm of geopolitics. Of course, you'd learn more at an actual military academy about strategy, but Quora does the work of getting the people that already went to those academies to boil down everything they learned into short, readable essays. In fact, I'm finding that I'm reading fewer long-form journalism articles and blogs because I find Quora so compelling. Those were my previous bar-none best source for information. Nothing beats curated long-form journalism for variety, but there's still a lot of noise and the work of separating it out is onerous enough and Quora is easy enough that I've already subconsciously switched, not bothering to maintain my RSS workflows. If I want some variety, I'll fire up Feedly or Pocket and pull out a few articles, but generally I'm looking to iterate on my high-level model of how the world works, geopolitical analysis from Stratfor and watching smart people answer stupid questions at Quora is the best bang-for-the-buck I've encountered for that. HN is the best place for business-specific information, if it weren't for that I'd have moved on a long time ago, I've been so far unable to find a good vein to mine for business on Quora, though it's half-decent with finance, though HN still beats Quora there too.
bb85 11y ago
Nitpicking but in SC2, or any video games, actions aren't analog. A unit's position is a function of 3 _probably_ 32bits numbers, giving 2^96 discrete positions. You can get that number much higher probably, by adding other factors like current speed, orientation, etc. You're right though that you have to tackle the problem differently, because while you'll be able to try to define a strategy in go by iterating over a bunch of discrete possibilities in the 19x19 grid, there is no way you can do that for a 2^hundreds size grid with current tech. I guess AlphaGo is in for a few semesters on strange attractors!
- hellbanner 11y ago
  How would strange attractors assist?
stcredzero 11y ago
Making the AI work well for Starcraft will be very difficult. In Chess and Go the actions are discrete; in Starcraft the actions are all analog. With Starcraft, you can throw sheer processing power at strategic decisions. If you're able to fast-simulate gameplay, even just on the order 10's of thousands of possibilities a second would give you a decent feel for overall strategic decisions. Sure, some nonlinearity might throw a result off by a huge factor, and you wouldn't have searched that. The opponent, human or AI, is faced with the same challenge, though. In the end, no one can predict the future because of chaotic nonlinearities. The best we can do is best account for the odds.
ejcx 11y ago
To go deeper, the challenge of balance begin from the most basic decision in Starcraft. Starcraft has three races and random. At top pro levels, picking random is unheard of and actually extremely difficult to play against because it complicates your very early decisions. Im also interested in who would be picked to play against DeepCraft. Flash would be incredible but he's retired. I'm curious which top level talent will be left by the time the bot is ready to play
- oneweekwonder 11y ago
  A wild idea would be to get a couple of top level talent together and let them play against DeepCraft for the first time, at the same time.
  - peferron 11y ago
    TaekBangLeeSsang vs DeepCraft. I'd watch the hell out of that. http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/TaekBangLeeSsang http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/TaekBangLeeSsang
- Merem 11y ago
  Flash is playing Broodwar and this is about Broodwar, not Starcraft 2. I still agree that the level of competition will be even lower by the time a proper bot will be ready (which will take a lot of years).
  - Malician 11y ago
    I could have sworn I saw an earlier source where Hassabis said it would be SC2, not SC1. As an aside, the "best player in the world" referred to in the article is the SC2 player SoS. I think Zest is pretty commonly viewed as best in the world right now, even if he loses the current GSL. They mentioned SoS because... he won blizzcon?!
    - kochthesecond 11y ago
      Then again, a bot that could play SoS would be truly marvelous
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
kochthesecond 11y ago
I can't fully agree here. I do agree a working ai will crush human players. But the challenge lies in that the entire state is not known. The opponent is hidden by fog, and unlike chess and go, things happen around around the map while you are not watching, i.e. You have to remember things like putting workers into the gases you built earlier, and pull them out if an all in is coming. The challenge lies in making the computer comprehend such decisions. Otherwise i think it will be hard to play a game of imperfect information at super human levels. Or it might find a new strategy that is totally imbalanced and unbeatable
- bnwllc3 11y ago
  Actually I think the imperfect information favors the machine. It's much easier to for an AI than human to control 10 scouting units and gain more information while doing everything else in the game. The challenge lies in making the computer comprehend such decisions. Does comprehending the decision go beyond: see x units / specific setup > need y units to counter > need z resources > switch to z resources.
  - javier2 11y ago
    Early game you cant afford 10 scouts. I think the difficulty of interpreting the information and the act of information gathering itself as a basis for planning and decision making is hard.
Gravityloss 11y ago
The Spring RTS had lots of open AI development because of its open nature (maybe it still has). You could just pick various AI:s for different players and have them play against each other etc... After a certain points they got really annoying to play against - it was always doing small scale harassment and evading with a perfect equation so you couldn't really ever catch it (unless you had much faster units). Besides actions per minute constraints, to be playable the AI at least should have some kind of reaction delay like humans have.
- fizx 11y ago
  I think this sort of thing will improve once AIs are trained using the human's enjoyment of the game as the primary utility function. This could be as simple as asking users to rate the preceding game at its conclusion. It could be as subtle as using the player's apm or other activity metrics as a proxy for enjoyment, if correlations were shown in play testing labs. This could allow for more training data, and less annoyance to users, who might be reluctant to provide manual ratings. The next step after that is adaptive AI, where the computer learns what you find enjoyable personally. I give it ten years before this is how every game works. Edit: Google has said that negative signals are extremely important to its search. A user bypassing the #1 result for the #2 is hugely bad for #1, but only a mild boost for #2. Similarly, perhaps minimizing "ragequit"s is a valid objective!
jrpt 11y ago
I wonder if it'd matter if the computer had both a max APM, and a requirement that its actions can only be in a field of view at one time, and that it can only change the field of view a certain number of times per minute. This would better simulate the constraints a human faces. You might think that's unfair to the computer, but we're also not requiring the computer use a mouse and keyboard, so we're actually giving it an advantage. I mean, if Starcraft were programmed such that I could control every unit with my mind instantaneously, I'd also do better than a human trying to toggle through hotkeys and micro with the constraints of a mouse/keyboard interface.
zouhair 11y ago
Just make the UI use a PC like a real player. It should look at the screen like everyone else.

bad_user 11y ago

Being able to have multiple battles at the same time is not terribly interesting, because humans can scale this as well. Team up two humans and they'll be able to do twice the work. Teaming two players to play a Go or a chess game against a computer wouldn't do that much good though. I've recently read Ender's Game and there was an interesting idea in there. In the book it is hive queens controlling the Buggers fleet with exquisite control, yet Ender is able to exploit this as a weakness, as every human is a sentient being capable of thinking and acting independently, so as a commander he was only giving high-level orders to his lieutenants and they did the rest. Which is how humans have fought wars.

Retric 11y ago
Things happened in Enders Game due to authorial fiat nothing more. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L4_zFYnnn2Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L4_zFYnnn2Y Game designers spend a lot of effort in RTS game keeping the AI from crushing people. This showes up not just in the games AI but also unit mechanics. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mHbloVZ15Pc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mHbloVZ15Pc
- Houshalter 11y ago
  Actually RTS AI is really bad and they almost all cheat to keep up with the player.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Having an AI that plays like a human is less fun. 'Cheating' is simply how developers can easily balance things. EX: Often there are units capable of infinite harassment with perfect micro. That's so far from being fun it's never part of actual game AI. Large base, small waves. It's a simple formula that makes people feel great! PS: Of course it goes deeper, units need to have basic AI because people can't micro manage large numbers.
    - Houshalter 11y ago
      I know, but there are even competitions where people write RTS AIs that can do micro like that, and humans still often beat them. Some game developers have great lengths to make good RTS AI that plays fair and like a human, and they are still easy to beat for skilled players.
erelde 11y ago
But that's not the case here, in most Starcraft tournaments it's 1v1. So it would be one 1 AI mounting serveral attacks at the same time against one humain player with the limitations it entails.
realharo 11y ago
If you team up two humans, they need to be very well coordinated to work together effectively, otherwise they'll just get in each other's way. Starcraft 2 has a mode like this called Archon Mode, where two players control the same units. The conflicts that can arise from this can be pretty fun to witness.
- cmdrfred 11y ago
  It appears the starcraft developers had the same conversation we are having here.
- duskwuff 11y ago
  A similar mode was present in the original Starcraft, albeit without the cool name. (It was simply called "team melee".)
  - hobarrera 11y ago
    No, it's a completely different thing. In Archon Mode, two physical players share control of a single in-game player. A lot more coordination is required or they'll both be giving counter-orders most of the time.
    - duskwuff 11y ago
      It's been a long time since I played team melee, and I've never played Starcraft 2 multiplayer, but reading back, I'm pretty sure they're the exact same thing: http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Team_Melee http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Team_Melee http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Archon_Mode http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Archon_Mode https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/314e28/archon_mode_vs_team_melee/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/314e28/archon_mo...
vinceguidry 11y ago
> I've recently read Ender's Game and there was an interesting idea in there. In the book it is hive queens controlling the Buggers fleet with exquisite control, yet Ender is able to exploit this as a weakness, as every human is a sentient being capable of thinking and acting independently, so as a commander he was only giving high-level orders to his lieutenants and they did the rest. Which is how humans have fought wars. I've read enough about real-world military strategy on Quora to know that this is nonsense. The amount of national resources that go into command and control networks is immense, these networks play a huge role in making our military unassailable. Something like the Bugger hive queens would be practically impossible to deal with in any real way, deception would be impossible to rely on. Deception is critical in an invasion, defenders have the advantage of knowing the terrain. If you could rely on a sensor network to reliably and instantaneously tell you where all the threats are, then you could simply rely on mobile forces to go wherever they're needed. Unless the attackers have an overwhelming numerical advantage, they won't be able to break through. D-Day would not have been feasible without the ability to deceive the Germans as to which beaches they were going to land the troops, a lot of time and effort went into planning that deception. Humans only stood a chance against the buggers due to their overwhelming weaponry, which will trump tactics and strategy every time. No way with that kind of weaponry would it even be a fair fight, any mildly competent general could have won with that advantage. The defensive response to overwhelming conventional superiority is guerrilla warfare, not trying to stand and fight toe-to-toe with nukes. Felt like a bit of a cop-out to me, authors should be required to spend some time on Quora verifying their basic assumptions, it would make for much better stories. Naturally Card didn't have access to it, and I still enjoyed the book. But it could have been much much better.
- na85 11y ago
  .... Quora being known the world over as an elite military strategy academy, of course.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    I ignored Quora for a long time, but once I took a look at it, it quickly became a valued part of my life. I've been on lots of Internet fora over the years, Quora really nails the problem of signal-noise ratio you typically get with forums, even HN isn't immune. I've learned more about the real world around us from Quora than I have from almost every other source. Only Stratfor rivals it, and that's only in the realm of geopolitics. Of course, you'd learn more at an actual military academy about strategy, but Quora does the work of getting the people that already went to those academies to boil down everything they learned into short, readable essays. In fact, I'm finding that I'm reading fewer long-form journalism articles and blogs because I find Quora so compelling. Those were my previous bar-none best source for information. Nothing beats curated long-form journalism for variety, but there's still a lot of noise and the work of separating it out is onerous enough and Quora is easy enough that I've already subconsciously switched, not bothering to maintain my RSS workflows. If I want some variety, I'll fire up Feedly or Pocket and pull out a few articles, but generally I'm looking to iterate on my high-level model of how the world works, geopolitical analysis from Stratfor and watching smart people answer stupid questions at Quora is the best bang-for-the-buck I've encountered for that. HN is the best place for business-specific information, if it weren't for that I'd have moved on a long time ago, I've been so far unable to find a good vein to mine for business on Quora, though it's half-decent with finance, though HN still beats Quora there too.

bb85 11y ago

Nitpicking but in SC2, or any video games, actions aren't analog. A unit's position is a function of 3 _probably_ 32bits numbers, giving 2^96 discrete positions. You can get that number much higher probably, by adding other factors like current speed, orientation, etc. You're right though that you have to tackle the problem differently, because while you'll be able to try to define a strategy in go by iterating over a bunch of discrete possibilities in the 19x19 grid, there is no way you can do that for a 2^hundreds size grid with current tech. I guess AlphaGo is in for a few semesters on strange attractors!

hellbanner 11y ago
How would strange attractors assist?

stcredzero 11y ago

Making the AI work well for Starcraft will be very difficult. In Chess and Go the actions are discrete; in Starcraft the actions are all analog. With Starcraft, you can throw sheer processing power at strategic decisions. If you're able to fast-simulate gameplay, even just on the order 10's of thousands of possibilities a second would give you a decent feel for overall strategic decisions. Sure, some nonlinearity might throw a result off by a huge factor, and you wouldn't have searched that. The opponent, human or AI, is faced with the same challenge, though. In the end, no one can predict the future because of chaotic nonlinearities. The best we can do is best account for the odds.

ejcx 11y ago

To go deeper, the challenge of balance begin from the most basic decision in Starcraft. Starcraft has three races and random. At top pro levels, picking random is unheard of and actually extremely difficult to play against because it complicates your very early decisions. Im also interested in who would be picked to play against DeepCraft. Flash would be incredible but he's retired. I'm curious which top level talent will be left by the time the bot is ready to play

oneweekwonder 11y ago
A wild idea would be to get a couple of top level talent together and let them play against DeepCraft for the first time, at the same time.
- peferron 11y ago
  TaekBangLeeSsang vs DeepCraft. I'd watch the hell out of that. http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/TaekBangLeeSsang http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/TaekBangLeeSsang
Merem 11y ago
Flash is playing Broodwar and this is about Broodwar, not Starcraft 2. I still agree that the level of competition will be even lower by the time a proper bot will be ready (which will take a lot of years).
- Malician 11y ago
  I could have sworn I saw an earlier source where Hassabis said it would be SC2, not SC1. As an aside, the "best player in the world" referred to in the article is the SC2 player SoS. I think Zest is pretty commonly viewed as best in the world right now, even if he loses the current GSL. They mentioned SoS because... he won blizzcon?!
  - kochthesecond 11y ago
    Then again, a bot that could play SoS would be truly marvelous

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

kochthesecond 11y ago

I can't fully agree here. I do agree a working ai will crush human players. But the challenge lies in that the entire state is not known. The opponent is hidden by fog, and unlike chess and go, things happen around around the map while you are not watching, i.e. You have to remember things like putting workers into the gases you built earlier, and pull them out if an all in is coming. The challenge lies in making the computer comprehend such decisions. Otherwise i think it will be hard to play a game of imperfect information at super human levels. Or it might find a new strategy that is totally imbalanced and unbeatable

bnwllc3 11y ago
Actually I think the imperfect information favors the machine. It's much easier to for an AI than human to control 10 scouting units and gain more information while doing everything else in the game. The challenge lies in making the computer comprehend such decisions. Does comprehending the decision go beyond: see x units / specific setup > need y units to counter > need z resources > switch to z resources.
- javier2 11y ago
  Early game you cant afford 10 scouts. I think the difficulty of interpreting the information and the act of information gathering itself as a basis for planning and decision making is hard.

Gravityloss 11y ago

The Spring RTS had lots of open AI development because of its open nature (maybe it still has). You could just pick various AI:s for different players and have them play against each other etc... After a certain points they got really annoying to play against - it was always doing small scale harassment and evading with a perfect equation so you couldn't really ever catch it (unless you had much faster units). Besides actions per minute constraints, to be playable the AI at least should have some kind of reaction delay like humans have.

fizx 11y ago
I think this sort of thing will improve once AIs are trained using the human's enjoyment of the game as the primary utility function. This could be as simple as asking users to rate the preceding game at its conclusion. It could be as subtle as using the player's apm or other activity metrics as a proxy for enjoyment, if correlations were shown in play testing labs. This could allow for more training data, and less annoyance to users, who might be reluctant to provide manual ratings. The next step after that is adaptive AI, where the computer learns what you find enjoyable personally. I give it ten years before this is how every game works. Edit: Google has said that negative signals are extremely important to its search. A user bypassing the #1 result for the #2 is hugely bad for #1, but only a mild boost for #2. Similarly, perhaps minimizing "ragequit"s is a valid objective!

jrpt 11y ago

I wonder if it'd matter if the computer had both a max APM, and a requirement that its actions can only be in a field of view at one time, and that it can only change the field of view a certain number of times per minute. This would better simulate the constraints a human faces. You might think that's unfair to the computer, but we're also not requiring the computer use a mouse and keyboard, so we're actually giving it an advantage. I mean, if Starcraft were programmed such that I could control every unit with my mind instantaneously, I'd also do better than a human trying to toggle through hotkeys and micro with the constraints of a mouse/keyboard interface.

zouhair 11y ago

Just make the UI use a PC like a real player. It should look at the screen like everyone else.