Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

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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'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.

More importantly, in my opinion, I'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'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.

When I was playing SC2 frequently a few years ago, someone made a program that used genetic algorithms to construct build orders [1]. It would produce a build that technically worked, but in a lot of cases they weren't very viable.

I tried to make a blink stalker rush that'd be the rough equivalent of the build shown in the post liked above, just with the Protoss race in the game. The program would tell me to do things like make two extractors but put fewer than necessary probes on them, pull probes to extractors after X trips or at X time (can't remember which), things like that.

1. http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/11/using-genetic-algorithms-to-...

I remember that program! Interesting though that my experience with it was different; I recall that letting it run for enough time it was able to come up with viable and often quite efficient build orders. By the way, I do seem to remember that putting 2 probes on an extractor was slightly more efficient (per probe) than 3 :)

Part of my problem was definitely what I was asking it to do. Going after blink so fast left me open to faster all ins like 2rax/2gate, 6 pools, etc. Being slightly slower than a 4gate and with more tech investment puts you even further behind if you can't do damage with the push. A better way to phrase it might be that the build worked, just not in the context of the metagame at the time.

I had to look it up again to be sure, but 2 on minerals 3 on gas haha: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/140055-scientif...

The program would tell me to do things like make two extractors but put fewer than necessary probes on them, pull probes to extractors after X trips or at X time (can't remember which),

Pros actually do both of those things.

This is true. I was on the higher end of the SC2 ladder (diamond 1v1) and still couldn't execute it consistently. One of many reasons I'm not a pro :)

One thing that helps (fwiw) is to recognize a diagnostic.....for example, if at minute 4 you are unable to build a gateway, it means you messed up the probe count at minute 2. That gives you almost immediate feedback on where the problem happened, without having to watch the replay.

Hey, thanks, I was looking for that this week!

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