How a Computer Game Is Reinventing the Science of Expertise
An anonymous reader writes "Cognitive scientists at Simon Fraser University and UCSD are beginning to use StarCraft 2 replays to study the development of expertise and the cognitive mechanisms of multitasking. Unlike similar expertise studies in chess that consider roughly a dozen players, these studies include thousands of players of all skill levels — providing an unprecedented amount of data on how players move from 'chumps to champions.'"
Like a study on the mass exodus of players doing ladder play after the koreans find the tournament?
this is really cool. that is all.
Ninety percent of the players in this tournament are not superhuman multitaskers. After watching enough of their first-person video streams, you see that most players can't react to novel situations. They just learn "build an army before the X minute mark", or "counterattack with fast ground units when his army moves out," executing the same limited skill set game after game. What this study will probably show is the rapid development of mechanical skills from low-to-mid level play, followed by the gradual acquisition of timings and strategic instincts.
...has been used as the new Tollan homeworld on Stargate: SG1 and Caprica's Riverwalk shopping district on Battlestar Galactica, among numerous others.
Herp derp.
Let me be the first to explain "why Starcraft 2?"
The answer lies in the oft-cited measure of player skill at the game: actions per minute. This is an unprecedented numerical measure of expertise that lends itself well to the study of "expertise" -- a term which means something different in the study of the brain than it does to the everyday person. Expertise is nothing less than a figurative rewiring of your brain in order to better excel at a chosen repetitive task. You can check out Wikipedia if you want to read more about it.
StarCraft seems to be a good case as it certainly is a game that requires significant multitasking.
However, there are other things which work in starcraft that don't seem to help with relating expertise in StarCraft with other areas of study. Use of hotkeys, unit management, unit production styles and map exploration techniques. The data from this study would only seem to help with determining experts at StarCraft or Real time strategy games.
So that you can scan all kinds of brain functions while this happens. It would help with brain function mapping as well, which we seriously need to know and understand. Brain surgery needs to go beyond just cutting hunks of meat, it needs to be about helping reroute neural networks in organic units, to include humans.
There is so much that we still don't understand and frankly it's annoying.
Take the Red Pill.
I like how they describe the Protoss as 'Photosynthetic Aliens' compared to the Terran as 'Humans' and the Zerg as 'Insectoid Aliens'
I mean, I guess that is part of the lore that Protoss photosynthesize, but definitely not the first thing that comes to mind.
More like 'Super Advanced Aliens' vs 'Super Primal Hive Insect Aliens"
The problem is the number of cells in the brain. It took years to map the brain of a damn worm, your brain is orders of magnitude larger and has even more orders of magnitude in connections. Besides, I don't think we have a scanner that can read activity on such a small scale yet. You'd only be able to map their brain after killing them and putting them under a scope.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
RTS games are the most applicable to a wide range of real world systems & strategies than say FPS games or any other type of game. It's not only emergency systems that it compares to, but also at a high level to many different business types & strategies as well. Techniques such as knowing when to scout, expand, and attack all require precise timing just like in the business world, maybe even for the day trader. I wonder if successful day traders have a high APM?
- Anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there.
When the lizard guy comes to recruit you, don't go. It's not Hollywood out there.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
We need general information, not microscopic at the moment. That's like shooting a mosquito with a bazooka. I am sure we can monitor plenty of brain activity and map some data. With large numbers like this and them all in the same type of brain function format, it's ideal for extrapolating observational data.
Think of it as watching brain functions like one would watch car traffic from above. We hope we could be tree top level, but we are doing good to just watch from orbit. If we can bring it down closer we can gather more data. Eventually we need to be "boots on the ground" with our levels of not only observation but operation, but that seems like a bit down the line. Lets knock out what we can do now while we are here.
Take the Red Pill.
That is NOT the reason I go to SFU. It's... one of a few reasons.
I saw a documentary where a brain surgeon was scanning a musicians brain while they were doing brain surgery and had the musician hum tunes while they mapped general locations so that they'd avoid hacking out those pieces while removing a tumor. They literally just had letters written on little pieces of paper and were just letting the wetness of his exposed brain hold them on :O
As a fellow cognitive scientist let me be the first to explain "why Starcraft 2?" The answer lies in the oft-cited measure of player skill at the game: actions per minute. This is an unprecedented numerical measure of expertise that lends itself well to the study of "expertise" -- a term which means something different in the study of the brain than it does to the everyday person. Expertise is nothing less than a figurative rewiring of your brain in order to better excel at a chosen repetitive task.
APM is a distorted metric. It does not distinguish between a meaningful action, a redundant action, a nervous "twitch" (i.e. multiple clicks rather than one), etc.
Furthermore it contains an additional distortion. Since it is a metric that players are evaluated by, and/or used in silly "pissing contests", it can be intentionally distorted. Why click on that point on the ground once when you can click on it five time rapidly? APM focused players often are manically clicking on empty ground issuing no unit orders when they have nothing to do for a second or two, they have rewired their brain to have them do "something" even if there is nothing useful to be done.
For the programmers reading along, Think of APM as the LOC (Lines of Code) of the Starcraft world. Both metrics can be meaningful in an idealized setting, but such is not the setting of most real world events.
It's awesome that there are potentially millions of SC2 replays available for data mining. They're surprisingly tiny files. And I think the really cool research project would be to data mine those files for strategies that the AI could master on its own. Because I suck at SC2, I don't really want to go out and embarrass myself in games against other people, so I often play against the game's AI. I also - reflexively - pause the game sometimes, which would be really impolite against a human opponent. But the game's AI is outrageously predictable and linear in how it approaches the game. I'd like to hope that once researchers discover what makes a starcraft player good, they can translate this to an AI expert system and make it play like a good player. Like there are computer chess tournaments, wouldn't it be fun to have SC2 AI tournaments? We'd learn a lot about AI in the process, probably more than we ever did through writing chess programs.
The title is confusing. Expertise is not a science. You (hopefully) get expertise when you do research, as the article explains.
-- Cheers!
Amazing, if I do say so. I see we need to engineer some better tools for our scientists to use to study brains with. I guess I need more biology classes as well. I should have started this 40 years ago.
Here's what I think of, an array set about the skull to pick up any kinds of RF, something sensitive, then some IR to check any kinds of thermal levels. What other kind of stuff could we monitor and use to project a mathematical graphing of this? Break out the fancy graphing calculator for that.
We need someone in the industry to finance this of course and to produce the helmets. Sony? lol...Nintendo? Microsoft? I'm not a billionaire yet, so I can't just whip them out at one of my many factories and run over to the tournament and pass them out. Think of the applications you could work then! Wow, you could just put a helmet on if you had all this information mapped. Humans work well with biofeedback equipment as it is. Think of the poor handicapped people who could then control about anything you hook up into their control. They could run factories.
I think it would shed lots of new data onto the situation, and give us some retrospect to some of our "human reverse engineering" we have done plenty of in the past. Seriously, we have mapped the human genome... let's get this done.
Take the Red Pill.
I'll reply to you.
Seems to me this is a severely flawed discussion, well into Apples & Oranges territory.
Let me talk from a modest knowledge of the chess side. Chess does not normally reward "actions per minute" except the subset of Blitz events. Yes, GMs have higher "throughput of variations" than amateurs, but generally so I've heard is that a "mere master calculates, the GM 'knows'." The GM simply doesn't even look at the weak moves. Then all that analytic firepower gets focused on grade A moves.
There are Many GMs upset with faster time controls. They operate best when their intuition takes a minute and a quarter to sift through the position and get the right "idea" then check it for 30 sec and make a move. That's a totally different metric than this "actions per minute" stuff.
Last is Sample Size. Any study with only 12 players is a joke. That's a funding / management problem. I bet 1000 chess players would love $100 to be in a study.
Posting AC but sayin' --TaoPhoenix
“Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics.” - Carl von Clausewitz
Now, what's Starcraft about again?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
nt
Check your premises.
You'd only be able to map their brain after killing them and putting them under a scope.
Obviously that's phase two. We couldn't exactly gather the two data sets the other way around, now could we?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I saw a programme on the American chess master who died in Iceland who played chess games. I forget his name.. But he seemd to be preoccupied with real world events that shaped his belief system ... too much.
I think that keeping it Virtual allows for people to engage on a fun level without the need for revealing one's self.
It seems to overcome the O.C.D. anyway.
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