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izzydata

That sounds like cheating doesn't it? Can I write a bot to play for me too?

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> Can I write a bot to play for me too?

Sure, if you can get Blizzard to specifically allow yours in competitive matches for research purposes.

My first reaction was "I bet this violates the ToS".

It is opt-in, so if you don't like the idea you don't have to participate. I think that's the best of both worlds.

If it's on the official site it doesn't violate the ToS by definition.

Yes, for the game creator but if anyone else where to do it it would be "BANNED" which is the point of this comment chain "do as we say not as we do".

This is just silly. I'm allowed to go into my house whenever I want and you aren't. That isn't me being a hypocrite, people who own things just have more rights to those things.

I think that can be problematic in some cases (third party browsers on iOS) but video games are not that important.

It's just amusing a company that sued individuals/companies for selling digital currency for World of Warcraft and has banned accounts from various games for relatively simple bots like mining and fishing in WoW, is going to allow much more 'intelligent' software to play against people.

Sure can, just not on open Battle.net https://github.com/deepmind/pysc2

Sounds like a great idea. An AI arms race.

Lots of smart people...Kids in high school competing could motivate them to learn more math.

My hope is that they'll eventually open up the API to allow the public to write their own bots.

Do you mean this? https://github.com/Blizzard/s2client-api

What's the point though? Most people won't have the resources to out-train Google's models. Maybe if every model received the same amount of CPU time to train...

Doing it for fun using traditional methods?

Good point. That was too defeatist of me :)

Is it using special API giving it all the information all at once instead of scraping the screen?

This is in the article. No, it can only deal with things that are visible to it.

Maybe he was asking if there was any visual perception that had to be done or is the data simply available without having to use visual analysis.

The former

It is not looking at the raw pixels. It gets fed a bunch of arrays, but is limited by what is currently on the screen and not in fog. The idea is that this would be perfectly doable with state of the art machine learning and would not measure our ability at making better AIs, merely add a failure point to the pipeline.

It still has potential of being hugely unfair when only receiving everything ordinary server broadcasts. As an example in World of Tanks server sends "a tree has fallen" to the client even if said tree is behind 50 other trees, totally in theoretical field of view! = there are cheats letting you know about unseen enemy movement. Then we get to previous blunder, is APM still averaged over last 5 seconds? FAQ carefully omits any numbers, merely promising "more restrictive than demonstration matches".

Personally I am not a fan of training our future slave masters how to efficiently kill human targets.

I don't believe it is using computer vision to read the pixels and translate that into data, no. It will still get the information about what's on its screen from the API.

So presumably it will get the same info you or I could get from the minimap (presence of units in a particular area but no details as to what) + detailed information about anything in its camera-like view. This will have some effect on how the bot manages its APM budget, since it now needs to consider camera management.

But honestly, from the perspective of the Alpha research, getting information from the pixels probably isn't an interesting problem. They can pretty safely assume that they could build a Computer Vision setup that could get the same info that the API gives, given enough time + GPU horsepower.

Any possible inaccuracy/delay that might result from using Computer Vision instead of the API can be simulated. You could add a response delay (already in AlphaStar), or a random chance that the API delivers incorrect information from time to time (which I don't think they do).

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