7 ms·

I wonder how Starcraft2 compares to Dota 2 in terms of difficulty for the AI. Moreover, I'd be interested to see how OpenAI and DeepMind's techniques, models di

by wpasc 8y ago

I wonder how Starcraft2 compares to Dota 2 in terms of difficulty for the AI. Moreover, I'd be interested to see how OpenAI and DeepMind's techniques, models differ in approaching these games.

steve_musk 8y ago
I would think SC2 is harder than Dota 2. In Dota you control 5 units while SC2 you can build hundreds.
- baq 8y ago
  in dota there are 10 players, so you have to coordinate. apples to apples this would mean 5 indepdendent bots per team that have to learn that. there are also summons to control and elaborate spell interactions.
- make3 8y ago
  at the same time that could be seen as an advantage for the machine, as multitasking is much easier for a massively parallel computer not limited by muscle movement or vision than for us. we'll see. depends on the usual stuff like limited apm ofc
  - loser777 8y ago
    I wonder if they stuck with their original game playing API that takes in some "visual" features. In that case it would be "limited" by vision.
- zhobbs 8y ago
  Technically, in Dota you only control 1 unit. That being said, I don't know if OpenAI's algorithm had 5 independent agents controlling 1 unit each, or 1 agent controlling 5 units.
  - mooneater 8y ago
    OpenAI Five had a separate agent per unit, no explicit coordination.
    - backpropaganda 8y ago
      This is incorrect. They shared neural net activations which is explicit communication.
  - marviel 8y ago
    I believe it's five identical agents: https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/ https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/ But because the agents were all trained together, they kind of operate as a unit. Coordination OpenAI Five does not contain an explicit communication channel between the heroes’ neural networks. Teamwork is controlled by a hyperparameter we dubbed “team spirit”. Team spirit ranges from 0 to 1, putting a weight on how much each of OpenAI Five’s heroes should care about its individual reward function versus the average of the team’s reward functions. We anneal its value from 0 to 1 over training.
    - vvillena 8y ago
      It would be fun to see the AI players spamming the ingame chat to communicate with each other in its own language :)
      - jrockway 8y ago
        A truly superb AI would guilt the support AI into buying wards by constantly whining about it in chat. It would also ping the minimap when one of its teammates makes a mistake. Finally, at the end of the match, it would pronounce "bad team" if it lost. (I never played dota2, that's all I know about the game ;)
  - jorgemf 8y ago
    In the last model they trained they shared some part of a layer for all the agents. So it was like a one agent trained with shared knowledge of the rest.
mooneater 8y ago
https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/3814/whats-the-difference-between-starcraft-and-dota-from-an-ai-perspective https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/3814/whats-the-differ...
- bredren 8y ago
  It is somewhat disturbing that the AI learned to creep-block on its own.
  - landryraccoon 8y ago
    It’s going to get even creepier for you then. I’d be very surprised if a decade from now any human player has a chance of beating a state of the art AI player in pvp games.
    - kevinmchugh 8y ago
      I'm interested to see how advanced AI can get at Spy Party
    - bredren 8y ago
      Reminds me of this woz quote an associate and I say to each other on occasion when creepy AI comes up: "The future is scary and very bad for people" which we shorten to "The future is scary and very bad." :) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/03/24/apple-co-founder-on-artificial-intelligence-the-future-is-scary-and-very-bad-for-people/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/03/24...
    - foolfoolz 8y ago
      that's not creepy at all. there's many sports today where a machine specially built for that task would dominate any human from ever winning. a baseball "player" that can hit a homerun on every swing. or throw a 150mph fastball. a basketball "player" that can make every single shot. you dont even need to defend that well when youre shooting 99% a "golfer" that can get a hole on one in every hole emulating human movement and agility will keep a few more sports safe, but not for long. im just sitting here waiting for the robot olympics
WhompingWindows 8y ago
The main difference would come in the simultaneous control of all of the different units in Starcraft. Both MOBAs and RTS share many characteristics, since Warcraft 3 was the origin of MOBAs to begin with. For instance, micro, unit pathing, lowground highground, fog of war, spellcasting, etc. However, in a MOBA there is more emphasis on team-play, on the interactions of 5-hero team compositions, which is decided upon at the start of the game. There is also itemization, which is much more stylistic than anything that can be purchased in an RTS. In Starcraft 2, it would be fantastic to individually control all 16 marines in your 2 medivac stim timing, pulling them back when they become the targets nearly instantaneously, perfectly shuffling them into/out of the medivacs, while focus-firing the defenses. Another example would be a reaper rush, a beastly AI could in theory micro 5-7 reapers individually, potentially breaking the game as human fingers/muscles/nerves have limits that CPUs and GPUs do not have. The latter concern, about sheer speed and potentially limiting APM of the Starcraft 2 AI, is a very interesting one. It would be interesting to allow the AI to match the average APM of the Global Finals players, for instance, which might be around 300 actions per minute. If the computer was allowed to utilize 3,000 actions per minute, it could surely perform much greater feats of micromanagement. The largest edge I see human players having vs the Starcraft AI would be something strategic, get a sense for how the AI plays then pull off a specific strategy which counters it. It may not work well in the current human-meta, but perhaps the AI will have its own meta that you can out-think it on?
- vvillena 8y ago
  > In Starcraft 2, it would be fantastic to individually control all 16 marines in your 2 medivac stim timing, pulling them back when they become the targets nearly instantaneously, perfectly shuffling them into/out of the medivacs, while focus-firing the defenses. Single unit pullbacks, medivac shuffling, and focus firing, all together, are commonly seen in pro-level matches. The guys are superhumanly insane. The current pro players can sustain 500 APM during battles. The only reason they don't do this even more is that they are usually fighting on two or three fronts at the same time, while managing base and unit production to the second. The real limit of the players is the single viewport and the single instruction input pipeline. Managing dozens of units with those heavy restrictions is pure madness. That's the main difference between RTSs and MOBAs. MOBAs are defined by strategy and tactics, teams win and lose because of those two factors (at pro levels). A game like Starcraft II adds another factor: players can simply break down when they're not able to keep up with the game. Even at pro level, players can be overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to process in tenths of a second, over and over again, for 15-25 minutes, or they can get into a spot where there's too much to do and not enough time to do it. AI has two advantages. It has better information channels, in the form of perfect vision, while humans have a single pair of eyes that have to scan through the screen. It also doesn't get tired over the course of the game.

by wpasc 8y ago

I wonder how Starcraft2 compares to Dota 2 in terms of difficulty for the AI. Moreover, I'd be interested to see how OpenAI and DeepMind's techniques, models differ in approaching these games.

steve_musk 8y ago

I would think SC2 is harder than Dota 2. In Dota you control 5 units while SC2 you can build hundreds.

baq 8y ago
in dota there are 10 players, so you have to coordinate. apples to apples this would mean 5 indepdendent bots per team that have to learn that. there are also summons to control and elaborate spell interactions.
make3 8y ago
at the same time that could be seen as an advantage for the machine, as multitasking is much easier for a massively parallel computer not limited by muscle movement or vision than for us. we'll see. depends on the usual stuff like limited apm ofc
- loser777 8y ago
  I wonder if they stuck with their original game playing API that takes in some "visual" features. In that case it would be "limited" by vision.
zhobbs 8y ago
Technically, in Dota you only control 1 unit. That being said, I don't know if OpenAI's algorithm had 5 independent agents controlling 1 unit each, or 1 agent controlling 5 units.
- mooneater 8y ago
  OpenAI Five had a separate agent per unit, no explicit coordination.
  - backpropaganda 8y ago
    This is incorrect. They shared neural net activations which is explicit communication.
- marviel 8y ago
  I believe it's five identical agents: https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/ https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/ But because the agents were all trained together, they kind of operate as a unit. Coordination OpenAI Five does not contain an explicit communication channel between the heroes’ neural networks. Teamwork is controlled by a hyperparameter we dubbed “team spirit”. Team spirit ranges from 0 to 1, putting a weight on how much each of OpenAI Five’s heroes should care about its individual reward function versus the average of the team’s reward functions. We anneal its value from 0 to 1 over training.
  - vvillena 8y ago
    It would be fun to see the AI players spamming the ingame chat to communicate with each other in its own language :)
    - jrockway 8y ago
      A truly superb AI would guilt the support AI into buying wards by constantly whining about it in chat. It would also ping the minimap when one of its teammates makes a mistake. Finally, at the end of the match, it would pronounce "bad team" if it lost. (I never played dota2, that's all I know about the game ;)
- jorgemf 8y ago
  In the last model they trained they shared some part of a layer for all the agents. So it was like a one agent trained with shared knowledge of the rest.

mooneater 8y ago

https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/3814/whats-the-difference-between-starcraft-and-dota-from-an-ai-perspective https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/3814/whats-the-differ...

bredren 8y ago
It is somewhat disturbing that the AI learned to creep-block on its own.
- landryraccoon 8y ago
  It’s going to get even creepier for you then. I’d be very surprised if a decade from now any human player has a chance of beating a state of the art AI player in pvp games.
  - kevinmchugh 8y ago
    I'm interested to see how advanced AI can get at Spy Party
  - bredren 8y ago
    Reminds me of this woz quote an associate and I say to each other on occasion when creepy AI comes up: "The future is scary and very bad for people" which we shorten to "The future is scary and very bad." :) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/03/24/apple-co-founder-on-artificial-intelligence-the-future-is-scary-and-very-bad-for-people/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/03/24...
  - foolfoolz 8y ago
    that's not creepy at all. there's many sports today where a machine specially built for that task would dominate any human from ever winning. a baseball "player" that can hit a homerun on every swing. or throw a 150mph fastball. a basketball "player" that can make every single shot. you dont even need to defend that well when youre shooting 99% a "golfer" that can get a hole on one in every hole emulating human movement and agility will keep a few more sports safe, but not for long. im just sitting here waiting for the robot olympics

WhompingWindows 8y ago

The main difference would come in the simultaneous control of all of the different units in Starcraft. Both MOBAs and RTS share many characteristics, since Warcraft 3 was the origin of MOBAs to begin with. For instance, micro, unit pathing, lowground highground, fog of war, spellcasting, etc. However, in a MOBA there is more emphasis on team-play, on the interactions of 5-hero team compositions, which is decided upon at the start of the game. There is also itemization, which is much more stylistic than anything that can be purchased in an RTS. In Starcraft 2, it would be fantastic to individually control all 16 marines in your 2 medivac stim timing, pulling them back when they become the targets nearly instantaneously, perfectly shuffling them into/out of the medivacs, while focus-firing the defenses. Another example would be a reaper rush, a beastly AI could in theory micro 5-7 reapers individually, potentially breaking the game as human fingers/muscles/nerves have limits that CPUs and GPUs do not have. The latter concern, about sheer speed and potentially limiting APM of the Starcraft 2 AI, is a very interesting one. It would be interesting to allow the AI to match the average APM of the Global Finals players, for instance, which might be around 300 actions per minute. If the computer was allowed to utilize 3,000 actions per minute, it could surely perform much greater feats of micromanagement. The largest edge I see human players having vs the Starcraft AI would be something strategic, get a sense for how the AI plays then pull off a specific strategy which counters it. It may not work well in the current human-meta, but perhaps the AI will have its own meta that you can out-think it on?

vvillena 8y ago
> In Starcraft 2, it would be fantastic to individually control all 16 marines in your 2 medivac stim timing, pulling them back when they become the targets nearly instantaneously, perfectly shuffling them into/out of the medivacs, while focus-firing the defenses. Single unit pullbacks, medivac shuffling, and focus firing, all together, are commonly seen in pro-level matches. The guys are superhumanly insane. The current pro players can sustain 500 APM during battles. The only reason they don't do this even more is that they are usually fighting on two or three fronts at the same time, while managing base and unit production to the second. The real limit of the players is the single viewport and the single instruction input pipeline. Managing dozens of units with those heavy restrictions is pure madness. That's the main difference between RTSs and MOBAs. MOBAs are defined by strategy and tactics, teams win and lose because of those two factors (at pro levels). A game like Starcraft II adds another factor: players can simply break down when they're not able to keep up with the game. Even at pro level, players can be overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to process in tenths of a second, over and over again, for 15-25 minutes, or they can get into a spot where there's too much to do and not enough time to do it. AI has two advantages. It has better information channels, in the form of perfect vision, while humans have a single pair of eyes that have to scan through the screen. It also doesn't get tired over the course of the game.