Im curious if a startup can be built from this.
Making an AI for game isn't about making a good AI. It is about making an AI that loses in a convincing manner. This is especially try for games like Starcraft (RTS and strategy games in general. For FPS games it really isn't so important as you can just increase or decrease the accuracy and hp of the enemies)
One commonality, it seems, is that players want to get better at the game. Perhaps, an AI that TEACHES the user to improve their play, and reduce errors would be an easier problem. So far we mostly do this using heuristics of gradually increasing difficulty, but it should really depend on what the player is weakest at... and what the user can improve at fastest! That is something nicely measurable, which you might use to train an AI.
Then, if/when people play against other human players they are as strong as they can be... often an FPS goal.
That's how MOOCs should function, too.
This is actually a way more interesting problem to solve, for the gaming industry.
Beating games is cool for industries where gaming is not the final problem (autonomous cars, various decision making, etc). But if AIs are to be exploited by gaming industry, it needs to learn things like : "is the user bored?", "what usually triggers new interest?", "how should difficulty be adjusted given current way the user is playing?", etc.
Wouldn't you be able to do mutual training that way? By mutating the AI's "strategy" only after losses, the player would continuously need to figure out a weakness in the AI's game-plan. And the AI tries to evolve its strategy every time it loses.
And a player in the top 20 percent could beat any AI that has ever been created.
AIs are really in an abysmal state for RTSes.
See "The Marginal Advantage," an essay from the famous Starcraft player Day9: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/64514-competitive-...
It's also worth noting that AlphaGo optimizes its perceived chance of winning the game, rather than its score. It "gets complacent" and mostly plays very conservatively the moment it's ahead on points, because it doesn't care about margins, only about win/loss.
I meant to say that strategy trumps mechanics. Mechanical proficiency is necessary but not sufficient.
Additionally, humans can use economic reasoning (player built 3 barracks to they can't be building x, y and z). This can lead to AI being excessively safe (economically inefficient).
And the last line you said is also true to make things even more difficult. :)
First person shooters can have super accurate AIs that are really frustrating to play against. Try beating the last "boss" in quake 3 on nightmare difficulty. A game like Starcraft relies much more on decision making that raw 3d math calculations and that makes making a decent AI pretty difficult without giving it advantages like extra resources or vision. That said, even though a game like Quake is easier to write an AI for, top players can still be top level AIs with superior reasoning about using the map and timing power up spawns and such.
The Worms series is also notorious for this. Their AI targeting seems to flip between "clueless" and "godlike", with very little middle ground. E.g. https://youtu.be/gqPITW04vRQ?t=1m20s
Starcraft however has all kinds of minor inefficiencies you can build in. You could inconsistently build workers, you could occasionally supply cap, your army comps can vary in sophistication level, etc.
It is actually about making a good AI. Civ 6 or SC2, in both cases they simply "cheat" by providing multipliers to the AI in order to solve its limitations. The basic function is largely the same. Providing the AI with cheat codes is not "good" AI.
A good AI design would remove the need for such arbitrary advantages that are out of context for human players and leads to weird issues.
Where the AIs tend to be very bad is in long term thinking and overall strategy.
Blizzard's AI in Starcraft generally plays like a slightly more aggressive but novice human. It's more fun than the TA AI, but not terribly strong once you understand the game mechanics.
What wrong with a strength option? I'd include an unbeatable entry in any case.
The same is sort of true in RTS games. The new rerelease of age of empires 2 has vastly improved AI that was developed by modders. Lots of players thought it was just cheating.
But in general it has been very well received. I think players can get used to good AI. They've just been trained to expect stupid AI that cheats.
Still, AI in games is mostly a trade-off. It usually can't take too much resources (because it usually has to run on the same machine the human is playing on), it has to be believable and fun to play against. This usually rules out too fancy algorithms and approaches with dubious returns.
Also, out of my experience with many different fields of programming, game programmers seem to want to write more of the stuff themselves than most. This would be another huge subject to go into, but I think the biggest reason is that historically you couldn't ever really punt on performance in games, and you had to tweak everything to your problem. If your game ran slowly or looked bad, people just wouldn't buy it.
Doesn't quite apply to a mario style game
Basically set up a queue of player and what NPC character to play and when a user gets to that part of the game where NPC needs to load, you jump in and play. When the NPC dies you the game (scene) and get put back in the queue of playable NPCs.
Unfortunately, humans will find advantages that shouldn't be used in any sort of game that tries to build a believable world.
That isn't to say it's a bad idea. You'd just have to design the game with human enemies in mind. I was very interested in The Crossing [2], which incorporated that of mechanic. Unfortunately, it was canceled. :(
[1] Not a made-up problem. https://youtu.be/UfZFHdywYLA
How would you scale for games with different inputs and outputs?
it's necessary anyway to prevent it from having godlike micro.