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Comment by fartboy69 | Hacker News Reader

As though StarCraft multiplayer wasn't difficult enough!

In all seriousness, this is pretty neat. Does anyone know if it already knows everything on the map, or if it has to discover units like the rest of us?

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It has full fog of war and has to use the camera like any human does. As of November at Blizzcon, apparently it wasn't doing enough exploring: http://starcraft.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/blizzcon-2018... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzUA8n_fczU&t=1360

More detailed discussions at https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/comments/aioc... & https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/aip7vu/d_d...

> As though StarCraft multiplayer wasn't difficult enough!

But it just won't be the same without someone telling me that I'm awful and my mother is of questionable morals.

... machine learning will probably pick that up too.

Personally I've found that Starcraft is one of the less salty/bm games out there. At least in diamond 1v1, people doing "gl hf" at the beginning and "gg" when they lose is common. And you don't have much time to whine in practice because there's no downtime until either you or them are basically dead.

The previous attempts at this would plug in the AI to a regular player interface. Tournaments would also impose APM limits to prevent inhuman rate of actions.

Does APM alone somehow win games? If that's the case this AI stuff is trivial.

The SC community seriously obsesses over APM, but I'm not entirely sure if it's correlation or causation. I personally think it's overblown and became popular because it's one of the few things you can easily measure and compare between players.

it's largely overvalued, but you probably can't be a pro without at least ~150, slightly less than 3 actions per second, increasing as the game goes on.

Well, ignoring spam clicks, APM is a measure of the number of decisions that a player makes throughout the course of the game. You'd expect a player making more decisions to come out ahead in a game as fast paced and action oriented as Starcraft.

It's clearly correlation. A pro will still play at a high level with mouse only, or even keyboard only.

Example keyboard only game: https://youtu.be/cY0d2kHzrxY

It makes a huge difference. In this video, 20 tanks kill 100 zerglings and lose only two tanks. With super-human micro, the results are... quite different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs

Reaction time is the real difference in this video. A human can't react to the twitch of the siege tank cannon that happens just an instant before the shot lands, we treat it as something that happens instantly and thus, we can't react to it, not even with a single unit. If you apply a human reaction time to that AI, that behavior isn't possible anymore, even with perfect micro.

I hope the paper release on Jan 24 will include such details.

There may not be any papers. They only announced a YouTube livestream of a 'demonstration'.

It has partial observability constraints.

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