Does anybody know how these bots perform against humans players? This seems to be early enough in its infancy that I would expect humans to outperform computer players pretty significantly but I might have too much faith in my own race.
We played against Oriol (the guy from the video linked in another reply), many times. Maybe 20. We won once. Now, keep in mind, he is a retired pro, and so he represents one of the very best players.
That said, by the end, he definitely needed to be very careful. He couldn't win any way he wanted to; he had to attack at the right time, etc.
We'll be posting a video of him against us soon. Probably the one where we won. :-) http://overmind.cs.berkeley.edu/
Is that enough to win a series against a champion of a major tournament? Is there a silicon BoxeR among us?
I think the true test of a Starcraft AI would be one with human-like restrictions. E.g., only so many actions allowed per minute, only vision of the current screen, built-in delays for actions that would tie up a human to perform, etc. Then the contest is truly more about intelligence and less about brute force.
The main issue is stracraft is pretty complex and if the computer is predictable, a human can just exploit that for easy victory. (always 6 pooling for example)
I guess that bots' micromanagement will become superior to humans, if it isn't already. A bot won't have any problem coordinating three or four battles at the same time. For humans it's quite hard to fight a multi-front war given StarCraft's UI.
Even the Insane AI in SC2 (which gets cheat advantage to minerals and gas) can be beaten 1v3 with just a 10 population protoss.
AI vs humans is rarely the standard 'Starcraft game' so much as its a puzzle game. The winning thing vs 3 insane AIs in SC2 was merely to forge-rush. Once you knew how, you could never lose to that AI again.
I'm sure the same is true of these AIs.
>While the expert player was capable of defeating the top performing bots in the competition, the results are quite encouraging.