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DeepMind AI AlphaStar Wins 10-1 Against 'StarCarft II' Pros (newscientist.com)
In a series of matches streamed on YouTube and Twitch, DeepMind AI AlphaStar defeated two top-ranked professionals 10-1 at real-time strategy game StarCraft II. "This is of course an exciting moment for us," said David Silver at DeepMind in a live stream watched by more than 55,000 people. "For the first time we saw an AI that was able to defeat a professional player." New Scientist reports: DeepMind created five versions of their AI, called AlphaStar, and trained them on footage of human games. The different AIs then played against each other in a league, with the leading AI accumulating the equivalent of 200 years of game experience. With this, AlphaStar beat professional players Dario Wunsch and Grzegorz Komincz -- ranked 44th and 13th in the world respectively. AlphaStar's success came with some caveats: the AI played only on a single map, and using a single kind of player (there are three in the game). The professionals also had to contend with playing different versions of AlphaStar from match to match. While the AlphaStar was playing on a single graphics processing unit, a computer chip found in many gaming computers, it was trained on 16 tensor processing units hosted in the Google cloud -- processing power beyond the realms of many.
Much like the dota bot from last year AlphaStar is effectively cheating as it is aware of the entire map at once, not restricted to the viewport as humans are. These are only really a novelty until they start operating on imperfect knowledge and imperfect inputs as humans are (even if it was arbitrarily limited on reaction speed).
Still not a fair match unless Deepmind is connected to a robot arm moving and clicking a mouse.
Playing a multiplayer game with bots used to be seen as an inferior experience to playing with real humans. Now imagine that instead of something like AlphaStar's utility function being set to trying to win, it's set to trying to make the human opponents have the most fun. Of course it'd need some understanding of the mindset of the player; they might not want to always win, or always have close matches, or possibly they're a sore loser. However, this could be inferred somewhat by player behavior (even outside of the match proper, e.g. in menus).
Put that in a game and ship it, and that could be a killer feature. People might prefer to play with a bot that'll guarantee a fun time, over a human that might rage quit or be an unfair match that leads to a one-sided game.
#MakeGamesSinglePlayerAgain
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Nobody notice the typo in the title? Wtf is Starcarft?
Are you saying it doesn't?
In competitive StarCraft, you take into consider build orders where you need to have done a specific set of steps in a specific amount of time. If you fail to do it, it puts you behind the opponent and will cause you to lose the game.
It's so meticulous that seasoned casters can actually tell a build based on how many workers a player has in a minute.
Just look at the Liquipedia entry for Protoss build orders and you'll see what I mean. And that's just one race out of three.
Is that the latest racing game from Blizzard?
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat