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UC Berkeley Offering Starcraft Course
The Tumeroks blog reports that the University of California, Berkeley is now offering a class on Blizzard's Starcraft real-time strategy game. "This course will go in-depth in the theory of how war is conducted within the confines of the game Starcraft. There will be lecture on various aspects of the game, from the viewpoint of pure theory to the more computational aspects of how exactly battles are conducted. Calculus and Differential Equations are highly recommended for full understanding of the course. Furthermore, the class will take the theoretical into the practical world by analyzing games and replays to reinforce decision-making skills and advanced Starcraft theory."
Depends on the course number really. NR20 would make the course a bit longer and focus on late game aspects.
:-D Maybe I should send the prof an email.
As an anecdote, my buddies would join a game (no rules), all selecting terran, and then immediately rush a player simultaneously with all our SCVs, and then move on to the next player after their probes were dead and weren't building any, repairing each others SCVs as neccesary. We would then move onto the next player. If we had 4 people we always won 3v3 obviously, with 3v3 we would win immediately about 90% of the time assuming no one quit. Many people complimented us on our bizzare strategy
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
Well someone must be teaching it - since they made it fit into an episode of The Wire and equated chess strategy with drug dealing practices in west side Baltimore.
they make math "cool" and students actually want to go to class.
Keep in mind that it's at a university, not high school. The students are there because they chose to be there, and they're free to leave at any time they want to.
I'm not saying "don't make the subject matter fun": please do that. But say I were to hire you based on your understanding of game theory; would I rather have one who spent half a year on doing the math, do you think, or one who spent half a year on doing some of the math and another part just playing games?
Unless I want you as my StarCraft coach, you, as a student, will have better marketable value by doing the math.
And hey, for my Algorithmic Game Theory course, I presented a paper showing how employing a tit-for-tat strategy in bittorrent leads to a market equilibrium. So it's not like you're forced to do dull stuff.
[full disclosure about my biases: I think math is "cool" in its own right. Finite fields kick ass, Lagrange interpolation is awesome and solving linear recurrence relations using matrix exponentiation (yay, Fibonacci) is a really neat idea. Almost---but not quite entirely---unlike digital watches]
Summary: make the math as fun and cool as you want, but don't make it fun by taking out the math part of it.