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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."
Who ever would have thought that the words "Zerg Rush" would have a legitimate chance of showing up on a final?
Do you think the students will rush this course ?
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They could make some use of the Campaign Editor to create maps for specific examples, whether it be theory or history based.
Also, would be interesting to see the course material leak online, since plenty of people can go along with examples.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
They decided to open a Porn Appreciation Course, citied in TFA http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3158640.html?menu=news.quirkies
The greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue - Socrates
It's a "DeCal" class run by students. Although a decal class requires a sponsorship from a professor, it is neither taught nor closely supervised by a professor.
the Balanced Annihilation mod really lets you enjoy strategy to a decent level of detail, while slashdot readers should really have a look at the geeky Kernel Panic mod ...
cheers from XXX ;^)
with due rezpect to LAP, eXe and others
In starcraft, you often have to make complex decisions: getting cheaper units quickly, or more expensive units later, or some combination of the two.
By breaking down and analysing the simultaneous equations involved in these decisions, voila, they make math "cool" and students actually want to go to class. Win-win.
If conducted at the same level of depth as TFA, a course on spreading butter on bread could well be a quite tricky one. Doing an analysis of how an irregular mixed water/lipid substance(whose properties change rapidly with temperature) behaves when applied to an irregular heated surface could be pretty hairy.
starcraft has been patched and refined so many times since 1998 that it is a near perfect example of balanced strategy which requires long term planning as well as short term planning, instant decisions and twitch.
there is no 'annihilation' mode in starcraft. you have to carefully craft your strategy.
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The worst thing is, they sound like those damn kids that beat you in chess and laugh at your face about it.
"Haha, I wouldn't move that bishop if I were you"
or
"Haha, do you really think those lurkers will be of any use?"
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
I don't see how it's any different from say studying the theory of chess
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If you do start to beat him, he will just drop out. This happens a lot, people just cant deal with loss.
Me and a friend use to team up. Both playing protos, he would focus on on building carriers, I focused on men, with a strong preference to worker drones, as they are the most powerful character in the game. So we build a small attack force, and with the men I attach a couple of workers. We drop them off all the chaos of war and fighting once the smoke clears we found that my worker has built a pilons with a bunch of canons and he is still working slowly engulfing the enemy base and wiping him out, leaving a couple of fighters to kill long distant weapons. It was usually a slow victory but so worth it.
An other way is to get those guys who steal other characters, they were supposed to be so you can take away a big gun and use it against you enemy. However you take a worker drone or whatever from each race, then you can build you own super army of all races Protos, Humans, and Zergs. The best part of doing that is that the guy thinks his partner has betrayed him. And attack him and creates a war on two fronts.
Oh the fun.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Protoss, please.
And the guys who steal other guys are Dark Archons.
In tetris, you often have to make complex decisions: getting single lines quickly or more lines later on.
Should you create a 'bad' line (piece does not fit)(to fill in later) or make future shapes less likey to fit.
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
I can just imagine the first class. The teacher will be standing there wondering where all his students are, then all of a sudden... "ZERG RUSH!", and everyone tries to squish through the classroom door all at once.
Sorry I haven't played in years. Even though I had fun with the games, I didn't have it run my life and really get to know each character personally.
I never said I was a master, but it was sure fun to come up with different strategies, that some times completely obliterated the guy who though he was all that.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Not to mention having to do that research paper on dropping toast.....does it always land butter side down? What if both sides are buttered? What if neither side is buttered? Can you create some weird perpetual motion machine by buttering half of each side?
The Knight and Rook pieces don't have frikkin' laser beams.
Pew pew!
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They might even win an award for this:
'1999 IgNobel Award in Sociology: Steve Penfold, of York University in Toronto, "for d oing his Ph.D. thesis on the sociology of Canadian donut shops."' http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/10.07/Ig-Nobels.html
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Can you create some weird perpetual motion machine by buttering half of each side?
To achieve that, you need to attach the piece of buttered toast (buttered side up) to the back of a cat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttered_cat_paradox
I think this is also what the school is trying to see, although university level is a bit extreme, I tend to make it more into secondary high schools, to stimulate the students into learning.
I applaud the approach to better fit new times, but will be very slow to adopt this new strategy to learning.
Pfft, that strategy is nothing.
Try this one:
You and a friend team up. One member builds carriers, you use your dark archons to capture em way beyond your food limit. Imagine being the other guy suddenly swarmed with OVER NINE THOUSAND carriers (and 8 interceptors each). If you don't kill his base, it'll surely kill his computer.
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.
And unless you're playing one of those lame unlimited resources maps stealing drones or SCVs is useless. It's almost always a waste of time and resources.
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.
If you had four buddies colluding in a 3v3 then you weren't really playing the game, you were just being jerks. If you had three in a 3v3 (all on one team) then it is a valid strategy. But it should never work against non-newbies since the other team should outnumber your SCVs by the time you reach their bases. Or at least the third target should have real defenses and a strong economy by the time you reach him and be able to counter you easily.
It's actually an even more complex and more interesting thing to study than chess, despite its "humble" origins as just a video game played by the masses. Players have to work with incomplete knowledge (they cannot see all of the opponents' pieces, like in chess). Notice also that opponents was plural -- enemies may turn on each other, or gang up on you. Also, in chess you have time to sit and think (aside from not overrunning the game clock), whereas in RTS games, sitting and thinking is rarely valuable: usually you're better off doing something than nothing at all.
...and that's just from the point of view of a human player. Now, try getting an AI to play an RTS instead of chess, and I think you'll quickly find the complexity of the game to be quite a challenge.
Unfortunately you are anonymous, but in case you read this:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/games/7eaa/
Is this the game? I just chose an online retailer, there are probably brick and mortar stores.
This is the company that makes the above one:
http://www.khet.com/
But I don't want to fight the cat. I was thinking a set up more like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer with the black being buttered and the white being unbuttered. Set it up horizontally and see how it "falls".
Perhaps you are thinking of this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/games/7eaa/
poor strategy.
against: -protoss: i would storm the carriers with a group of archons, or target the main blimp with some corsars. you wouldn't even have the time to create your cannons.
-terran: sieged tanks wouldn't hesitate on eliminating all chances of canons. whilst my goliaths were targeting the blimps.
-zerg: no chance against of hydras hiding under a defiler cloud. maybe even a plague for good measure.
In unrelated news, admission applications to UC Berkeley from Korea have doubled. Admissions workers are puzzled by the number of students named "Kekekeke".
In pong... uh.. nevermind..
Until I can get my PhD in StarCraftery I will take a pass. Besides, I will likely be too busy playing to care.
I haven't played Starcraft online for a nearly a decade, so they may have patched my favorite strategy: using the Zerg Queen to parasite all available animals.
Since those units are never highlighted as hostile, players usually ignore them - killing them only if their presence interfered with a potential building site.
Once set, you'd have a bunch of covert spies all over the map. Flying animals were prized due to their mobility and were even less likely to be killed by players.
This is not my sig
$15 - waived if student currently owns Starcraft and Brood War
And how do you know he aint talking about laser chess? The board game version Khet is quite awesome!
IIRC the only reason the AIs stand any chance in starcraft multiplayers is that they cheat.
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How in the world was this modded insightful? Getting things wrong and defending yourself when you're wrong is insightful? You don't have to have something run your life to avoid giving inaccurate information about it.
I heard that, back in the day, there were Virtua Fighter 2 classes in Japan.
Circumcision is child abuse.
You've been punked, /.
On the other hand, all I ever hear about hiring and degrees is that they don't care a whit about your actual education, since all that academic "theory" is supposedly crap anyway, right? All they want is proof that you can finish something. So people take that to heart and make courses like this, and then the people doing the hiring want to complain because we actually listened to them? People can't constantly go on about how worthless degrees are other than "for proving you can finish something" and then also complain when the bar for getting degrees is continually lowered so that all it indicates is whether or not you can finish something.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Except this isn't James Woods High School, this is UC Berkeley, which is (supposedly!) in the top 5 in the US for Mathematics programs.
If you need Starcraft to make math "cool" after having already taken Calculus and Diff Eq as prereqs, then something is seriously wrong with your choice of classes...
It's called "Game Theory" and it's used to design compilers and wage wars. The Chinese are very good at it; look up the Chinese Remainder Theorem for an interesting but non-game-theory innovation of Chinese warfare. Also there's the Byzantine Generals Problem, the Prisoner Dilemma, etc, that all fall under this subject.
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Learn to brew beer, then think about that bread. You'd be surprised.
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BINGO!
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In Chess you have a few seconds to think about something, depending on how much time is on your chess clock; I may be able to spend 30 second deciding a move, some moves may take 3 seconds and others minutes.
Starcraft is realtime, and so moves are not discrete. In Starcraft, my decisions have an impact at the point they're made. If I need 3 minutes to decide how to handle a besieging army, it may be too late to build more forces; it may also be too late to actually resist, the game might be over. If I respond within 30 seconds, I may need to sacrifice some forces on the front line while I build more. If I respond within 10 seconds, I may be able to keep 95% of my forces, and roll in back-up with new forces faster than the enemy can slay them. Some actions may also require time themselves, so I may have to consider that delay and what I can parallel, versus resource costs, etc...
Chess is very discrete and on a rigid rule set. Starcraft is very analogue and on a rigid rule set as well; but the rule set allows for a much more complex decision tree, which changes during the time required to make a decision. Also, in Chess every move is of a fixed duration; in Starcraft, different moves have different time costs. Starcraft moves can also occur in parallel to hide the time cost, meaning one decision can be free time-wise and thus its optimal ordering is "immediately, up front" unless we immediately need the resources it requires.
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Time has a high cost, yes.
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it's actually listed as "Remaining a virgin throughout college - 101"
Are you asking "would you rather hire someone who studied just theory, or would you rather hire someone who studied theory as well as the practice of that theory?"
There's a field of study called "game theory" that's used to design operating system schedulers, lock contention resolution systems, symmetric multiprocessing systems, all sorts of AI, and compilers. Research typically dives into games like Chess, and Go, etc. This is a very valuable course.
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I always fell asleep in math class because I'd stay up all night playing Starcraft. Neat idea in theory.
For me, Starcraft is more like speed chess and I love chess. I still suck at math though.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Or it makes students skip to play Starcraft...
"Advanced Starcraft theory" leaves a weird, tingly sensation in my mouth.
You mean a class where you sit playing a game on your laptop while some professor is at the board giving a lecture? I had that class in college. I called it physics101... and intro to computer science... and ... well you get the picture.
I tried that and came to a strong conclusion: the cat lands on its feet and the toast is butter-side up. Regardless, I did not eat the toast afterwards.
Actually, depending on the version, and if you're playing for max score, you want to make single lines for every line except for the last one of a level, where you want to get a double because it gives you the most amount of bonus points, so your score ends up being higher even if you theoretically got only tetrises.
You have a good point.
I'd have to know the details of the course to give a good answer to that.
I did a computational physics degree, and as a result, had to take some computer science classes.
There was one class (ok, it was boring, but still) where by the end of it, the only two regular attendees were myself and a mathematician. Not a single CS student felt the need to attend.
In another class, upon being told that some simple university-level mathematics would be used, had all the computer scientists recoiling in horror.
Now maybe these guys were the exception rather than the rule, but if it was my job to have to try to teach them, I'd be willing to try anything, including renaming maths to "starcraft"
Those cases differ significantly from the kind of problems that a starcraft course would presumably cover, though I'll admit I usually incorrectly assume discreet, turn-based game theory to be the entirety of the field
Don't get me wrong, I think its shameful that Berkeley is doing this...
I have to agree... but I've seen a lot of university students in that situation, albeit not studying at quite as high prestige an institution as Berkeley.
Actually, they really don't stand any chance unless the player(s) intentionally avoid certain strategies which badly exploit the AI. Playing against AIs can still be fun in a "Can I win without doing X, Y, or Z" type of way, but while SC's AI is very advanced for its day, it's not even close to a standard chess program in terms of skill required to defeat it.
On the other hand, SC2 will supposedly have an AI so good it will *not* need to cheat - either through seeing the whole map or getting extra resource income (the advantages found in previous Blizzard RTS games). If pulled off, this would be very cool indeed - it's a rare AI in any RTS that doesn't cheat at all yet isn't a total pushover.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Island maps (of the non-unlimited-case variety) can make stealing another race worthwhile (and often possible, since Mind Control on a transport gets you whatever is inside s well). That said, serious players tend to avoid island maps, so I suppose the point is moot.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
That is why we launch some ground units too to fight those guys. The point isn't to win the battle but to stall until the cannons are made. For the most part people don't see the strategy as the game has blimps covering the guy building the cannons, so they just send guys to fight the blimps, whos goal is survive long enough to get the cannons up.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No no no, the perpetual motion machine is made by strapping a piece of toast (butter side up) to the back of a cat and then dropping it. It will forever spin right above the ground.
I don't think sticking blocks certain places is all that complex. The only decision in tetris is should you wait for that straight line to come down or is it getting too high so that you need to start removing some lines so you don't risk losing. It is very simple, then they just make it faster to make it more difficult. You can say anything is similar to something if you simplify it enough. But really, you are comparing a bike to a motorcycle. Not saying it is more or less fun, just that there is a heck of a lot more strategy and theory in starcraft than there is in tetris.
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It's basically identical to discrete, turn-based theory, except time is an analog resource. Waiting is analogous to passing turns in chess without moving, except that you can somehow magically pass half a turn, or a quarter turn.... (there's a specific field resolution and velocity of travel and rate of attack etc for each unit, so you could come up with a minimal "turn" length, but ...)
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Is the board game Starcraft being used in the course? The link doesn't seem to work. Yehuda http://purplepawn.com/