This video demonstrates why: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs
AI has crushed humans in Go, the most complicated (widely played) board game. I'll be impressed again by AI when it beats us in physical sport.
> AI has crushed humans in Go, the most complicated (widely played) board game.
In terms of ruleset, Starcraft is at least a few orders of magnitude more complicated than Go. It doesn't feel more complicated to humans, really, but the sheer number of variables at play is vastly higher.
Starcraft II runs at a higher frame rate and uses higher resolution maps, so these numbers are even more ridiculous there.
Messed up your conversion there, fps is seconds and you had game length in minutes, so need to multiply by 60. So that's 28,800 "turns".
Go's game state, for example, is very small. You can pretty much represent it with a 19x19 array of 2-bit variables, because each space only has three possible states. That's only 722 bits. Maybe a few more to track whose turn it is and how many pieces each player has remaining.
In contrast, Starcraft can have hundreds of units in play from dozens of types, each of which usually has at least a position value (x and y) and a health value, and commonly has other things like energy value and cooldown values. And each of these you'd need at least a 16-bit int. And that doesn't even get into the enormously larger possible action space for each "turn".
Could you explain how you figure that in more detail?
I mean, to my untrained eye, it sounds like it wouldn't be so, since in every time slice of the game (equiv. of a turn in Go?) you can have hundreds of points of control - hundreds of levers to choose to pull - and of course that's in every frame (or whatever interval the UI actually allows you input).
When a Starcraft AI is ready, it will be incredibly obvious if it's using brand new builds, strategies, and tactics (which pros will immediately copy for the next $500,000 tournament) or if it's "just" using 10,000 APM to perfectly dodge attacks in a way that a human never could.
I'm guessing Google and Tencent are going for the former instead of the latter.
In any case, this can be solved by capping the actions per minute near Pro human levels, somewhere in the 300-500 range.
There are still incredible strategy problems to be solved that cannot be overcome with perfect micro. Figuring out a build alone using RL (which is what I think this paper is doing) is still a huge step.
Dota2 is not the same way - some of the best players perform micro-control on par with AI. This makes AI in DoTA much more impressive
Dota II focuses more on compounded micro decisions throughout the entire game for sometimes 60 mins+. Dota II revolves around using your one hero (with the exception of meepo), and teamwork much more heavily. The amount of different scenarios in DoTA II is significantly higher because of all the different heros, skills, levels, and combinations thereof.
Starcraft has very predictable scenarios though. There is usually less than 10 meta builds at any given competitive nerf/post patch balance. Dota II is hundreds if not thousands, per hero, per team composition, etc. So AI is way more impressive in Dota II
There are hundreds if not thousands of builds for each hero?
Until then, yes as you put it, the AI would crush humans and unfairly so.
And the micro advantage is not all that relevant since APM and latency restrictions can be imposed on the AI to force them to play under conditions comparable to human players.
Also you have to consider whether voidrays have speed upgrades, same with repears. Terran can play with fog of war too and lift off, usually terran has an advantage here
If players could do that reliably we would start seeing major unit changes. It already happened to the original void rays who would do things like attack themselves to maintain charge to keep massed annihilation capability.
However, a bot could use just the same information a player could theoretically have access to but humans can’t pay attention to it all at once- that would be a real advantage. This one is basically cheating extra information though.