6 ms·

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. Ot

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.

lordnacho 10y ago
> 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?
- Thaxll 10y ago
  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.
  - Maro 10y ago
    > Imagine one army where every single unit is controlled by one human. Each individual unit would be very very strong. Like a real army :)
- trjordan 10y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs It's just broken. It's not even the same game.
  - defen 10y ago
    How does the AI "know" which Zergling is going to be fired upon? Are the tank shots not instant-hit? Or is this just a demonstration of what actual optimal control would look like.
    - detaro 10y ago
      The tanks aren't given overriding manual commands, so it likely could just predict how their automatic targeting works. If a player would give commands, it could get at least some information from the animation frames before the target is aquired and the shot fired. (The implementation in the video likely just cheats and gets the information from the engine, but at least the first case should be deterministic enough)
  - theptip 10y ago
    I enjoyed this, thanks for sharing. Pretty cool.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    A nice illustration of the potential battlefield of tomorrow.
    - otempomores 10y ago
      Privat third in first row you ve been ai selected to draw splash damage for king and cuntry. Everybody else give him some privacy
      - ethbro 10y ago
        That sounds not unlike some of the battlefield reasoning Morgan puts in the post-cyberpunk Takeshi Kovacs series. Winning against AI in a sufficiently complex game looks very different than winning against a human.
      - spdionis 10y ago
        "cuntry"... the irony...
- tyrust 10y ago
  I haven't played SC in a few years, but I think I can give a basic answer. There's would not be one optimal strategy, but many optimal strategies depending on the matchup between units. By taking advantages in differences in movement speed, attack range, attack projectile speed, and attack cooldown, a weaker group of units can potentially beat a stronger group. This is an older video that demonstrates some examples of winning with good micro: https://youtu.be/CdSKD3LRHV8?t=11 https://youtu.be/CdSKD3LRHV8?t=11. An AI knowledgeable of and capable of executing such tactics would be pretty strong.
  - stouset 10y ago
    Given that the game wasn't balanced for the possibility of infinite micro, I think it's highly probable that there's a globally optimal strategy.
    - tyrust 10y ago
      Could you give an example of what that might look like?
      - stouset 10y ago
        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 capable of destroying only a handful of tanks before being killed of. For an AI with infinite APM, they can move all but an individual targeted zergling out of the way of the tank's splash damage. This allows them to take out all of the siege tanks with only moderate losses. Many such matchups will be tossed on their heads, and it's likely that one of them is totally game-breaking.
        otempomores 10y ago
        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.
- patmcguire 10y ago
  There's almost certainly a bunch of timing-based micro with animations/game ticks/etc that a machine would find. For example, if a machine does a sequence of actions with sub-millisecond precision they can pop a unit into range, fire, and then pop back out again without being fired upon over and over. A lot of units would be rendered useless because it's balanced for humans. That means the units they counter would be a lot stronger. I'm afraid it would probably just be a race to get the fastest rush.
  - __s 10y ago
    Rush is a bit risky, it has to be invested in before enough scouting & will go up against well micro'd workers Meta is still pretty fast, here's a SC1 AI finals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjSXj4cb_Yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjSXj4cb_Yo
  - stale2002 10y ago
    Rushing is a bit of a rock paper scissors situation. You can beat a fast rush by doing a slightly slower rush that focuses more on economy, and winning via defenders advantage.
  - quantumpotato_ 10y ago
    I thought units attacked instantneously, there was end-lag but no startup?
  - halflings 10y ago
    What you're describing is called "kiting", and is already being done by regular players (not to mention the pros). It is only possible for some combinations of units, for example Marines with stimpack vs regular zerglings ("slowlings"), or Viking vs Void Ray because one unit needs to be fast enough to be able to shoot + move out of range before being shot. Here's the type of micro pro players can do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrAlhk98WxE± https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrAlhk98WxE± They do say that they will limit the number of actions taken by the AI to focus on building a smart and strategic AI instead of learning gimmicky micro moves, but if one thing is sure, it's that even the best micro cannot win a StarCraft game if the macro is not on point, and bad choices are made (good luck micro-ing siege tanks against a swarm host!)
- rlayton2 10y ago
  Infinite micro? I'd just send all drones/probes/SCVs directly to the human's base and kill their drones. The extra drones that the human has wouldn't be able to make up the difference.
  - catshirt 10y ago
    you are oversimplifying things and ignoring a lot of variables. just to illustrate a point: on a sufficiently large map, i could have four times as many workers by the time your first set reaches my spawn. if i'm playing Protoss against a Terran AI, i have an added advantage of worker regen without having to stop attacking.
  - quantumpotato_ 10y ago
    humans have tried this -- 6 pooling to grandmasters: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/283755-grandmaster-by-6pooling-how-to http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/283755-grandmas...
  - halflings 10y ago
    This is already an infamous strategy (worker rush) and it os easily countered as long as you have all your workers united and attack at once (not much micro can be done at that point, and the numerical advantage trumps that... unless you're playing protoss and constantly trying to replenish shields, and still!). Also, I'm pretty sure this is not something that DeepMind would do to "solve intelligence".
- thesimpsons1022 10y ago
  still a tough question but they could do some insane things. for instance if they had 200 marines and controlled each individually i can't imagine what they'd do. for humans it's requires insane mechanics to even break them up into 8 seperatel groups and control them for more than a few seconds
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
frostirosti 10y ago
Could probably configure it/optimize it for different apms (10,100,300,inf) Could be interesting to see if it chooses different strategies based on that. What actions will optimize performance if I can only do 50 a minute
- softawre 10y ago
  We've seen exactly this happen in competitive play. There was a player who would always play "Mech" Terran units, even though it wasn't the best strategy, because he had a lower APM than the Korean pros did. And it worked for him, too.
make3 10y ago
the article says explicitly that they will limit the capacities of the ai to things that are mechanically (physically) possible for humans
somerandomness 10y ago
'Computers are capable of extremely fast control, but that doesn’t necessarily demonstrate intelligence, so agents must interact with the game within limits of human dexterity in terms of “Actions Per Minute”.'
- tempestn 10y ago
  Yes, this is definitely necessary for it to be interesting. Even so the AI will have some significant advantages over a human, in terms of being able to perfectly time events like injects, chrono boosts, etc., and watching every visible area of the minimap at once, so never being unnecessarily surprised by an attack. There are plenty of other examples. Nothing that's technically impossible for a human, but the ai will be perfect at those aspects as a given. For the human player to win, even limiting the machine's APM, they will need considerably superior strategy to make up for these differences. Also, I'm not sure how they plan to limit APM, but if it's done in the naive way - the AI simply isn't allowed to surpass an APM of X, there will be plenty of optimizing it can do in terms of spending those actions more optimally than a human could (in some cases by performing fewer but more difficult actions to accomplish a task), as well as by remaining at peak APM continuously throughout an entire match. (Something that is a hallmark of great players, but like map awareness and macro timing, no human is able to keep up their peak speed indefinitely without any lapses.)
  - anchpop 10y ago
    Why not limit it to a certain number of keys typed per second, and a certain rate of moving the cursor? Maybe randomly wait 0-150 ms before sending a keypress to simulate human imprecision?
    - halflings 10y ago
      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.

lordnacho 10y ago

> 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?

Thaxll 10y ago
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.
- Maro 10y ago
  > Imagine one army where every single unit is controlled by one human. Each individual unit would be very very strong. Like a real army :)
trjordan 10y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs It's just broken. It's not even the same game.
- defen 10y ago
  How does the AI "know" which Zergling is going to be fired upon? Are the tank shots not instant-hit? Or is this just a demonstration of what actual optimal control would look like.
  - detaro 10y ago
    The tanks aren't given overriding manual commands, so it likely could just predict how their automatic targeting works. If a player would give commands, it could get at least some information from the animation frames before the target is aquired and the shot fired. (The implementation in the video likely just cheats and gets the information from the engine, but at least the first case should be deterministic enough)
- theptip 10y ago
  I enjoyed this, thanks for sharing. Pretty cool.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  A nice illustration of the potential battlefield of tomorrow.
  - otempomores 10y ago
    Privat third in first row you ve been ai selected to draw splash damage for king and cuntry. Everybody else give him some privacy
    - ethbro 10y ago
      That sounds not unlike some of the battlefield reasoning Morgan puts in the post-cyberpunk Takeshi Kovacs series. Winning against AI in a sufficiently complex game looks very different than winning against a human.
    - spdionis 10y ago
      "cuntry"... the irony...
tyrust 10y ago
I haven't played SC in a few years, but I think I can give a basic answer. There's would not be one optimal strategy, but many optimal strategies depending on the matchup between units. By taking advantages in differences in movement speed, attack range, attack projectile speed, and attack cooldown, a weaker group of units can potentially beat a stronger group. This is an older video that demonstrates some examples of winning with good micro: https://youtu.be/CdSKD3LRHV8?t=11 https://youtu.be/CdSKD3LRHV8?t=11. An AI knowledgeable of and capable of executing such tactics would be pretty strong.
- stouset 10y ago
  Given that the game wasn't balanced for the possibility of infinite micro, I think it's highly probable that there's a globally optimal strategy.
  - tyrust 10y ago
    Could you give an example of what that might look like?
    - stouset 10y ago
      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 capable of destroying only a handful of tanks before being killed of. For an AI with infinite APM, they can move all but an individual targeted zergling out of the way of the tank's splash damage. This allows them to take out all of the siege tanks with only moderate losses. Many such matchups will be tossed on their heads, and it's likely that one of them is totally game-breaking.
      - otempomores 10y ago
        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.
patmcguire 10y ago
There's almost certainly a bunch of timing-based micro with animations/game ticks/etc that a machine would find. For example, if a machine does a sequence of actions with sub-millisecond precision they can pop a unit into range, fire, and then pop back out again without being fired upon over and over. A lot of units would be rendered useless because it's balanced for humans. That means the units they counter would be a lot stronger. I'm afraid it would probably just be a race to get the fastest rush.
- __s 10y ago
  Rush is a bit risky, it has to be invested in before enough scouting & will go up against well micro'd workers Meta is still pretty fast, here's a SC1 AI finals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjSXj4cb_Yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjSXj4cb_Yo
- stale2002 10y ago
  Rushing is a bit of a rock paper scissors situation. You can beat a fast rush by doing a slightly slower rush that focuses more on economy, and winning via defenders advantage.
- quantumpotato_ 10y ago
  I thought units attacked instantneously, there was end-lag but no startup?
- halflings 10y ago
  What you're describing is called "kiting", and is already being done by regular players (not to mention the pros). It is only possible for some combinations of units, for example Marines with stimpack vs regular zerglings ("slowlings"), or Viking vs Void Ray because one unit needs to be fast enough to be able to shoot + move out of range before being shot. Here's the type of micro pro players can do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrAlhk98WxE± https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrAlhk98WxE± They do say that they will limit the number of actions taken by the AI to focus on building a smart and strategic AI instead of learning gimmicky micro moves, but if one thing is sure, it's that even the best micro cannot win a StarCraft game if the macro is not on point, and bad choices are made (good luck micro-ing siege tanks against a swarm host!)
rlayton2 10y ago
Infinite micro? I'd just send all drones/probes/SCVs directly to the human's base and kill their drones. The extra drones that the human has wouldn't be able to make up the difference.
- catshirt 10y ago
  you are oversimplifying things and ignoring a lot of variables. just to illustrate a point: on a sufficiently large map, i could have four times as many workers by the time your first set reaches my spawn. if i'm playing Protoss against a Terran AI, i have an added advantage of worker regen without having to stop attacking.
- quantumpotato_ 10y ago
  humans have tried this -- 6 pooling to grandmasters: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/283755-grandmaster-by-6pooling-how-to http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/283755-grandmas...
- halflings 10y ago
  This is already an infamous strategy (worker rush) and it os easily countered as long as you have all your workers united and attack at once (not much micro can be done at that point, and the numerical advantage trumps that... unless you're playing protoss and constantly trying to replenish shields, and still!). Also, I'm pretty sure this is not something that DeepMind would do to "solve intelligence".
thesimpsons1022 10y ago
still a tough question but they could do some insane things. for instance if they had 200 marines and controlled each individually i can't imagine what they'd do. for humans it's requires insane mechanics to even break them up into 8 seperatel groups and control them for more than a few seconds
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

frostirosti 10y ago

Could probably configure it/optimize it for different apms (10,100,300,inf) Could be interesting to see if it chooses different strategies based on that. What actions will optimize performance if I can only do 50 a minute

softawre 10y ago
We've seen exactly this happen in competitive play. There was a player who would always play "Mech" Terran units, even though it wasn't the best strategy, because he had a lower APM than the Korean pros did. And it worked for him, too.

make3 10y ago

the article says explicitly that they will limit the capacities of the ai to things that are mechanically (physically) possible for humans

somerandomness 10y ago

'Computers are capable of extremely fast control, but that doesn’t necessarily demonstrate intelligence, so agents must interact with the game within limits of human dexterity in terms of “Actions Per Minute”.'

tempestn 10y ago
Yes, this is definitely necessary for it to be interesting. Even so the AI will have some significant advantages over a human, in terms of being able to perfectly time events like injects, chrono boosts, etc., and watching every visible area of the minimap at once, so never being unnecessarily surprised by an attack. There are plenty of other examples. Nothing that's technically impossible for a human, but the ai will be perfect at those aspects as a given. For the human player to win, even limiting the machine's APM, they will need considerably superior strategy to make up for these differences. Also, I'm not sure how they plan to limit APM, but if it's done in the naive way - the AI simply isn't allowed to surpass an APM of X, there will be plenty of optimizing it can do in terms of spending those actions more optimally than a human could (in some cases by performing fewer but more difficult actions to accomplish a task), as well as by remaining at peak APM continuously throughout an entire match. (Something that is a hallmark of great players, but like map awareness and macro timing, no human is able to keep up their peak speed indefinitely without any lapses.)
- anchpop 10y ago
  Why not limit it to a certain number of keys typed per second, and a certain rate of moving the cursor? Maybe randomly wait 0-150 ms before sending a keypress to simulate human imprecision?
  - halflings 10y ago
    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.