<story><title>DeepMind – StarCraft II Demonstration</title><url>https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/starcraft2/22871520/deepmind-starcraft-ii-demonstration</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>b_tterc_p</author><text>That doesn’t really sound like it understands the game... is this not training by playing against itself? How is it not learning the flawed reasoning behind this strategy?</text></item><item><author>SketchySeaBeast</author><text>&amp;quot;DeepMind has been hard at work training their AI (or agent) to better understand StarCraft II. Once it started to grasp the basic rules of the game, it started exhibiting amusing behavior such as immediately worker rushing its opponent, which actually had a success rate of 50% against the &amp;#x27;Insane&amp;#x27; difficulty standard StarCraft II AI!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Well, that&amp;#x27;s fun. I mean, if it works, it works.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chongli</author><text>The reasoning behind worker rushing is sound. StarCraft II is a game of hidden information and there&amp;#x27;s no time where that&amp;#x27;s more relevant than the beginning of the game.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that there&amp;#x27;s a sort of rock-paper-scissors game of (conservative)-(greedy)-(all in). That is, a player who build defenses early on will crush a worker rush but they&amp;#x27;ll be far behind a player who ignores defenses and focuses on growing their economy. The worker rush is designed to punish this greedy build order.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s nothing that can be done, really. If you decide to send a worker to scout super early on then your economy suffers so much that you&amp;#x27;ll be behind no matter what you do.&lt;p&gt;Edit: to those of you drawing a distinction between an immediate worker rush and something like an early pool or a cannon rush, that&amp;#x27;s splitting hairs. These are all classified as all-in strategies that almost automatically lose if they encounter a conservative build order.</text></comment>
<story><title>DeepMind – StarCraft II Demonstration</title><url>https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/starcraft2/22871520/deepmind-starcraft-ii-demonstration</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>b_tterc_p</author><text>That doesn’t really sound like it understands the game... is this not training by playing against itself? How is it not learning the flawed reasoning behind this strategy?</text></item><item><author>SketchySeaBeast</author><text>&amp;quot;DeepMind has been hard at work training their AI (or agent) to better understand StarCraft II. Once it started to grasp the basic rules of the game, it started exhibiting amusing behavior such as immediately worker rushing its opponent, which actually had a success rate of 50% against the &amp;#x27;Insane&amp;#x27; difficulty standard StarCraft II AI!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Well, that&amp;#x27;s fun. I mean, if it works, it works.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>__blockcipher__</author><text>&amp;gt;How is it not learning the flawed reasoning behind this strategy&lt;p&gt;If it&amp;#x27;s playing against the Starcraft 2 blizzard AI, it will learn a lot of &amp;quot;bad habits&amp;quot; because outright bad strategies work against the AI. Thus the worker rushing.</text></comment>