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AIs vs Humans - Next Battle: Starcraft (businessinsider.com)
braindrainbahrain writes: Having conquered checkers, chess, and more recently Go, artificial intelligence research now looks at the next frontier: the popular real-time strategy game of StarCraft.
Blizzard Entertainment's president reached out to Google's DeepMind researchers last month, who are now describing StarCraft as "our likely next target". But many top StarCraft experts believe AIs will fail because "Unlike machines, humans are good at lying," reports the Wall Street Journal. An executive at the Korea e-Sports Association tells them "It's going to be hard for AI to bluff or to trick a human player."
One University of Alberta computer scientist David Churchill counters that âoeWhen the AI finds that the only way to win is to show strength, it will do that. If you want to call that bluffing, then the AI is capable of bluffing, but there's no machismo behind it." Unfortuantely, for five years Churchill has been running AI-vs-human StarCraft tournaments, and "So far, it hasn't even been close... Using a mouse and keyboard, the world's top players can issue 500 or more commands a minute," the Journal reports. But they add that now both Facebook and Microsoft are also working on small StarCraft AI projects.
Blizzard Entertainment's president reached out to Google's DeepMind researchers last month, who are now describing StarCraft as "our likely next target". But many top StarCraft experts believe AIs will fail because "Unlike machines, humans are good at lying," reports the Wall Street Journal. An executive at the Korea e-Sports Association tells them "It's going to be hard for AI to bluff or to trick a human player."
One University of Alberta computer scientist David Churchill counters that âoeWhen the AI finds that the only way to win is to show strength, it will do that. If you want to call that bluffing, then the AI is capable of bluffing, but there's no machismo behind it." Unfortuantely, for five years Churchill has been running AI-vs-human StarCraft tournaments, and "So far, it hasn't even been close... Using a mouse and keyboard, the world's top players can issue 500 or more commands a minute," the Journal reports. But they add that now both Facebook and Microsoft are also working on small StarCraft AI projects.
First off it's very easy to write an algorithm that lies and misinforms when optimal. Second, and this is a joke, have you ever seen a progress bar be accurate when downloading or installing something?
For instance, micro [manage units] so they never stay closer than their maximum range...
The player is effectively commanding AI already. If we want to test strategy not fast twitch processing then such features should be added to the unit's AIs that both the strategic AI and players command. in other words: If the troops you nest into battle can't "never stay closer than their maximum range" on their own, then you have stupid troops who need to be replaced with smarter troops, i.e., if the AI wins because the game is an unrealistic simulation that favors AI's winning then it doesn't say shit about the AI beating a human... That would be like having the world's fastest mathematician compute square roots against a smart phone, and then claiming the smart phone was smarter than humans because it can perform billions of calculations per second.
If ( speed == win ) then victory = !strategic;