Humans Are Still Better Than AI at StarCraft (technologyreview.com)

29-year-old professional StarCraft player Song Byung-gu won 4-0 in the world's first contest between AI systems and professional human players, writes MIT Technology Review. An anonymous reader quotes their report: One of the bots, dubbed "CherryPi," was developed by Facebook's AI research lab. The other bots came from Australia, Norway, and Korea. The contest took place at Sejong University in Seoul, Korea, which has hosted annual StarCraft AI competitions since 2010. Those previous events matched AI systems against each other (rather than against humans) and were organized, in part, by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a U.S.-based engineering association.

Though it has not attracted as much global scrutiny as the March 2016 tournament between Alphabet's AlphaGo bot and a human Go champion, the recent Sejong competition is significant because the AI research community considers StarCraft a particularly difficult game for bots to master. Following AlphaGo's lopsided victory over Lee Sedol last year, and other AI achievements in chess and Atari video games, attention shifted to whether bots could also defeat humans in real-time games such as StarCraft... Executives at Alphabet's AI-focused division, DeepMind, have hinted that they are interested in organizing such a competition in the future.

The event wouldn't be much of a contest if it were held now. During the Sejong competition, Song, who ranks among the best StarCraft players globally, trounced all four bots involved in less than 27 minutes total. (The longest match lasted about 10 and a half minutes; the shortest, just four and a half.) That was true even though the bots were able to move much faster and control multiple tasks at the same time. At one point, the StarCraft bot developed in Norway was completing 19,000 actions per minute. Most professional StarCraft players can't make more than a few hundred moves a minute.

Comments

One thing constantly surprises me w/ these stories

[93 Escort Wagon]

For some reason I am always amazed to find out there are people who can make enough money to live on by playing video games.

And yes, I'm old.

Re:That's only because Deepmind wasn't playing

[guruevi]

Not really, Go and chess are full-knowledge games, you know at all points, where your opponent currently is, what his moves have been and where he can go. Not to say, there are only a very small numbers of paths you can take at any point in time.

StarCraft is a partial-knowledge game, you have to intuit where your opponent may be popping out what his intentions are based on very limited amounts of data and counter their strategy accordingly. There are also various ways of winning the game, you can starve your opponent, you can just go out and destroy him with superior force, annoy him continuously or simply execute a fast counterattack when their forces are away from the base in an offensive maneuver and most likely a combination of those things will win you the game. You can't just "guess" a solution because 90% of the times you will guess wrong, the game develops very differently based on tech trees your opponent chooses and choosing your own tech tree is a constant back and forth of trying to one-up your opponent.

This is really the worst situations for AI. There are no "common situations" as you have in chess or Go that you can just hard-code ideal responses to. AI's are still very poor at pattern recognition if the patterns aren't fully visible.