<story><title>DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment</title><url>https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-and-blizzard-release-starcraft-ii-ai-research-environment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>burke</author><text>&amp;gt; When Google’s AI can beat a human at StarCraft, it’s time to be very afraid.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t actually agree with this. Unlike Go, StarCraft is not only a game of strategy; &amp;quot;micro&amp;quot; (micro-managed tactics, basically) also plays a big role. An AI is going to be able to issue a LOT more commands per second than even the most skilled humans, giving them a natural tactical advantage.&lt;p&gt;Strategy is more difficult for an AI, but not the only deciding factor in StarCraft.</text></item><item><author>theptip</author><text>This is pretty interesting.&lt;p&gt;DeepMind’s last triumph (beating the best human Go players with AlphaGo) is impressive, but Go is a great fit for neural networks as they stand today; it’s stateless, so you can fully evaluate your position based on the state of the board at a given turn.&lt;p&gt;That’s not a good fit for most real-world problems, where you have to remember something that happened in the past. E.g. the ‘fog of war’ in a strategy game.&lt;p&gt;This is a big open problem in AI research right now. I saw a post around the time of AlphaGo challenging DeepMind to tackle StarCraft next, so it is very cool that they have gone in this direction.&lt;p&gt;When Google’s AI can beat a human at StarCraft, it’s time to be very afraid.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theptip</author><text>Agreed that micro is a big advantage that AIs have held in previous AI vs. Human StarCraft contests, but the OP stated that the SC2 research environment will limit the AI to (elite) human APM levels, so that edge will be somewhat blunted. It&amp;#x27;s probably fair to question whether all actions are counted equally; I could believe that an AI could allocate their action budget more widely than a human can, even while hitting the same total APM.&lt;p&gt;More importantly, in my opinion, I&amp;#x27;m not aware of any other AIs that have been competitive at the StarCraft problem using a Neural-Net-based implementation; from talking to PhDs in the field (but not from direct technical experience, so take this with a pinch of salt), my impression is that state-of-the-art RNNs just don&amp;#x27;t have the ability to encode the history of the game-world in a way that would enable them to be competitive. So it will require significant advances to the theoretical models to be able to compete using the sort of implementation that DeepMind will build.</text></comment>
<story><title>DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment</title><url>https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-and-blizzard-release-starcraft-ii-ai-research-environment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>burke</author><text>&amp;gt; When Google’s AI can beat a human at StarCraft, it’s time to be very afraid.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t actually agree with this. Unlike Go, StarCraft is not only a game of strategy; &amp;quot;micro&amp;quot; (micro-managed tactics, basically) also plays a big role. An AI is going to be able to issue a LOT more commands per second than even the most skilled humans, giving them a natural tactical advantage.&lt;p&gt;Strategy is more difficult for an AI, but not the only deciding factor in StarCraft.</text></item><item><author>theptip</author><text>This is pretty interesting.&lt;p&gt;DeepMind’s last triumph (beating the best human Go players with AlphaGo) is impressive, but Go is a great fit for neural networks as they stand today; it’s stateless, so you can fully evaluate your position based on the state of the board at a given turn.&lt;p&gt;That’s not a good fit for most real-world problems, where you have to remember something that happened in the past. E.g. the ‘fog of war’ in a strategy game.&lt;p&gt;This is a big open problem in AI research right now. I saw a post around the time of AlphaGo challenging DeepMind to tackle StarCraft next, so it is very cool that they have gone in this direction.&lt;p&gt;When Google’s AI can beat a human at StarCraft, it’s time to be very afraid.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arcticfox</author><text>I agree. I think you&amp;#x27;d have to limit that machine&amp;#x27;s APM to somewhere around the human limit, and make it choose which actions it wants to spend its time on.&lt;p&gt;Otherwise the AI is eventually just going to absolutely destroy humans with micro, which is not remotely interesting. We&amp;#x27;ve known transistors were faster than fingers for ages.</text></comment>