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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.
It used to be news when software beat humans at yet another game. Now it is news when we find a game that humans can still win.
I've played StarCraft competitively (note: not professionally) and follow the professional scene (yes there's still a pro scene). There's a special depth to Starcraft that other games lack.
Most of the ranks below top level are all about macro/micro mechanics. Macro (economy, building units, ensuring supply cap doesn't ever get hit) is easy for AI to do. Micro is more challenging but still a task that's better for computers than humans. Top level players are already so good at both of these that there's really only diminishing returns left for computers to gain an edge over them in. They're even so good as to know exactly if they'll win a fight between each unit; almost like they're subconsciously calculating the end game of any engagement automatically. You can even see them know exactly how many attacks it will take. It's freakishly superhuman.
They also have developed some sort of insane intuition. You can watch them play against each other and move units to locations or build defenses in places only seconds before they need them despite having zero knowledge of the impending threat (such as building turrets right when there's about to be a drop on your resource line). There's instances where the tactics become so deep that they manipulate "thinking ahead" to double or triple bluffs to create openings. To beat these players, you need to have a deep understanding of human motivations. Classic tricks such as hold position lurkers spell doom for computer opponents who need to understand where their enemy might be laying a trap for them, /if they have gone lurkers/. For all you know they're using stop lurkers to deceive you into thinking lurker/ling/hydra is their strategy, while they're in position to wipe out your workers with muta micro.
It's simply not a game where you can calculate the odds and win every game, because you lack sufficient information to calculate any meaningful conclusions.