4 ms·

Not sure how good this AI would be. It pretty much delegates micromanagement and lets the user make high-level decisions. However, it doesn't seem fine grained

by cloudkj 16y ago

Not sure how good this AI would be. It pretty much delegates micromanagement and lets the user make high-level decisions. However, it doesn't seem fine grained enough to handle different situations. The fact that the 8 buttons include unit names is slightly worrying; is this is specifically for Protoss? What if a reaver drop is the current optimal plan of attack? What about scouting? There were no scout units at all. The video just shows the person clicking "attack" and the zealots/dragoons automatically moving towards the enemy base, so maybe the "black sheep wall" cheat is presumed to be enabled. Scouting is one of the most important tactics. How would the system deal with cloaked units, etc? It just seems like a helper system that does trivial things like executing a standard build order, assigning probes to resources, etc.

ShardPhoenix 16y ago
I don't think this is intended to be a serious way of playing the game.
yosho 16y ago
Yah this is kinda cool, but hardly practical in terms of any real game play. Also, I think the beauty of starcraft is that it is extremely hard to master due to the complexity involved. Like chess, there are standard opening moves but beyond the initial sequences, the possibilities are almost endless. I would like to see someone program a computer who could beat the best starcraft player. I bet that would make the IBM Deep Blue seem like a joke.
- borisk 16y ago
  >>I would like to see someone program a computer who could beat the best starcraft player. I bet that would make the IBM Deep Blue seem like a joke. Deep Blue is ancient, modern chess programs make it look like a joke ;-) In SC a program can abuse early some insane micromanagement to win before any hard strategy/positional decisions have to be made.
  - csytan 16y ago
    Not true. There is a trade off between speed and economy when doing an early rush. The attacking player will always have less attacking units than the defensive player due to the travel distance between bases. (Assuming the defensive player is prepared for the rush) In addition, by the time any first tier attacking units reach you, it's always possible to have a defensive structure, which can deal fairly well with any sort of micromangement.
    - borisk 16y ago
      >> There is a trade off between speed and economy when doing an early rush. The attacking player will always have less attacking units than the defensive player due to the travel distance between bases. (Assuming the defensive player is prepared for the rush) The attacking AI can abuse it's much much higher APM to do a lot of damage with less units. Like killing workers with zealots, zerglings or vultures. >>In addition, by the time any first tier attacking units reach you, it's always possible to have a defensive structure, which can deal fairly well with any sort of micromangement. Defensive structures are 1. expensive and 2. can be bypassed. An AI can use the same resources, human spent on defense, to expand or tech, easily winning the game.
      - _delirium 16y ago
        I can definitely see better micro giving the AI an advantage, but it seems like it'd have to have at least competent strategic play to still do well; it's hard to recover from completely screwed-up build order. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, though; if bots in the Starcraft AI competition (http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition) do start winning exclusively through insane micro and a hardcoded rush in the first 2 minutes, it might need to be changed to stay interesting. To me, the most interesting part is seeing what kinds of AI architectures can simultaneously deal with real-time action across all the levels of complexity--- micromanaging individual units while also making unit-group-movement decisions, build-order decisions, expansion decisions, teching-up decisions, etc., which coordinate with each other. That might need a different game or a variant, though; it's possible that Starcraft is now too much like chess, where people have already mapped out giant databases of opening books (you can find detailed information on various SC wikis about exactly when to build different things in which order, what to build to counter other strategies, etc.). So it might be that a computer perfectly executing one of those hardcoded strategies with perfect micro is too close to optimal to be interesting. But I'm not sure that's true yet; current bots are actually not too great. Alternately, someone could make an APM-limited variant to handicap the computer a little closer to human clicking speed. That would introduce a strange optimization problem where the AI would need to optimize its click usage as a limited resource.

by cloudkj 16y ago

ShardPhoenix 16y ago

I don't think this is intended to be a serious way of playing the game.

yosho 16y ago

Yah this is kinda cool, but hardly practical in terms of any real game play. Also, I think the beauty of starcraft is that it is extremely hard to master due to the complexity involved. Like chess, there are standard opening moves but beyond the initial sequences, the possibilities are almost endless. I would like to see someone program a computer who could beat the best starcraft player. I bet that would make the IBM Deep Blue seem like a joke.

borisk 16y ago
>>I would like to see someone program a computer who could beat the best starcraft player. I bet that would make the IBM Deep Blue seem like a joke. Deep Blue is ancient, modern chess programs make it look like a joke ;-) In SC a program can abuse early some insane micromanagement to win before any hard strategy/positional decisions have to be made.
- csytan 16y ago
  Not true. There is a trade off between speed and economy when doing an early rush. The attacking player will always have less attacking units than the defensive player due to the travel distance between bases. (Assuming the defensive player is prepared for the rush) In addition, by the time any first tier attacking units reach you, it's always possible to have a defensive structure, which can deal fairly well with any sort of micromangement.
  - borisk 16y ago
    >> There is a trade off between speed and economy when doing an early rush. The attacking player will always have less attacking units than the defensive player due to the travel distance between bases. (Assuming the defensive player is prepared for the rush) The attacking AI can abuse it's much much higher APM to do a lot of damage with less units. Like killing workers with zealots, zerglings or vultures. >>In addition, by the time any first tier attacking units reach you, it's always possible to have a defensive structure, which can deal fairly well with any sort of micromangement. Defensive structures are 1. expensive and 2. can be bypassed. An AI can use the same resources, human spent on defense, to expand or tech, easily winning the game.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      I can definitely see better micro giving the AI an advantage, but it seems like it'd have to have at least competent strategic play to still do well; it's hard to recover from completely screwed-up build order. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, though; if bots in the Starcraft AI competition (http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition) do start winning exclusively through insane micro and a hardcoded rush in the first 2 minutes, it might need to be changed to stay interesting. To me, the most interesting part is seeing what kinds of AI architectures can simultaneously deal with real-time action across all the levels of complexity--- micromanaging individual units while also making unit-group-movement decisions, build-order decisions, expansion decisions, teching-up decisions, etc., which coordinate with each other. That might need a different game or a variant, though; it's possible that Starcraft is now too much like chess, where people have already mapped out giant databases of opening books (you can find detailed information on various SC wikis about exactly when to build different things in which order, what to build to counter other strategies, etc.). So it might be that a computer perfectly executing one of those hardcoded strategies with perfect micro is too close to optimal to be interesting. But I'm not sure that's true yet; current bots are actually not too great. Alternately, someone could make an APM-limited variant to handicap the computer a little closer to human clicking speed. That would introduce a strange optimization problem where the AI would need to optimize its click usage as a limited resource.