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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.
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.
Here's some general thoughts on what makes SC difficult for an AI.
Starcraft has areas of focus called 'macro' and 'micro'. Macro is base building, selecting which tech tree to advance down, upgrading, building your economy. Micro is controlling small groups or individual units and their position on the map and how they engage with enemy units. For a very rough idea, alternative terms would be macro = strategy, micro = tactics.
Someone who is excellent at macro can be destroyed by someone who is lousy at macro and excellent at micro, and vice versa. The top players are excellent at both macro and micro.
Scouting what your opponent is doing is a bit part of both your macro and micro strategies but in different ways. If you see the enemy has built unit factory X, then you better counter it by building Y (macro). If it's in map location Z, then you better make sure you get your units to position A to head them off (micro).
There are 3 races in SC so 6 possible match-ups include the 'mirror' matchups. If both players are random, then each player must scout their enemy to initially learn their race. Then there are known build-orders, so if you scout your enemy at time 2 minutes, and see X and Y, then you can conclude they are (probably) using strategy A. But if you get that exact same set of information at time 4 minutes, then concluding they are using strategy A may be a mistake.
Humans know these build orders (like expert players memorising important chess gambits), but the AI likely doesn't, so has to brute force everything. Brute-forcing is possible in chess, and thought impossible in Go. So Starcraft is an extension in this same area.
Yes, human players can still beat second tier AIs from Facebook and universities.
But if you turned the AlphaGo Zero team on it it would dominate it in a couple months max. AGZ learned, from scratch, how to beat every human on the planet at Go every single time in 3 days.
I don't get this at all.
It's Texas. Wasn't everybody in the building carrying some sort of concealed firearm to defend themselves with, including the preacher?
No sig today...