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dganton Creating a Starcraft AI – Part 22: Caveat Implementor

The main discussion forum is Discord: https://discord.gg/HpnNmsG

Announcements are usually on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bwapi

Another popular StarCraft-related blog is: http://satirist.org/ai/starcraft/blog/

There's a 24/7 stream of AI games at: https://twitch.tv/sscait (perfect background noise for coding)

And I have to mention the research done by my team on StarCraft at: https://torchcraft.github.io/TorchCraftAI/

dganton Paul Allen has died

NFL rules require that an NFL team have a majority owner (with Green Bay grandfathered as an exception).

It will likely have to be sold.

dganton Institutional Investors Are Using Back Door for Crypto Purchases

It's telling that the risk premium is 20%.

dganton Boston-area startups are on pace to overtake NYC venture totals

What's a good source for keeping up with the industry?

dganton OpenAI Five Benchmark: Results

There's a substantial community around Hearthstone AI: https://hearthsim.info/

dganton The Cosmetic Class

Humans are all susceptible to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect -- it predates civilization.

dganton Reinforcement learning’s foundational flaw

Enjoyed the article. But I'm a bit confused by the Venn diagram; neither StarCraft nor DOTA are deterministic or fully observable. And they are discrete only at such extreme resolutions that they may as well be continuous.

dganton Learning ‘Montezuma’s Revenge’ from a single demonstration

StarCraft is a strategy game but it's also an action sport. The "how" of micro actions is largely the sport itself, both from a decision-making and execution standpoint. Imagine a footballer having a "kick goal" or a "kick ball past goalie" button -- it'd largely defeat the purpose.

I believe the command spamming /u/tomlock is referring to is the phenomenon where players issue as many or more commands when doing nothing as when an intense sequence is happening. This is primarily done to keep rhythm.

dganton TorchCraft – StarCraft: Brood War AI

There are a few ways to run Brood War headlessly. And if not headlessly, sped up as fast as your CPU can process frames (and Brood War is very fast -- it ran on Pentium 90s!). TorchCraft is compatible with any Brood War client that supports BWAPI, including the headless ones.

BWAPI supports optional user interaction: https://bwapi.github.io/class_b_w_a_p_i_1_1_game.html#a4db25... and https://bwapi.github.io/class_b_w_a_p_i_1_1_game.html#a4db25... -- someone actually just used BWAPI to make an automated real-time coach: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/533143-coach-ai-ha...

dganton Vanguard Founder Jack Bogle Says ‘Avoid Bitcoin Like the Plague’

That's not an investment. There is no value being generated and nothing is growing. It's speculation.

dganton Facebook Quietly Enters StarCraft War for AI Bots

Brood War competitions have been going on for seven years, with individual bots getting years of development. If beating professionals was easy it'd have been done by now.

It turns out that being really good at narrow micromanagement situations doesn't add up to winning complete games. StarCraft is messy and difficult.

dganton Facebook Quietly Enters StarCraft War for AI Bots

https://www.facebook.com/groups/bwapi

dganton Facebook Quietly Enters StarCraft War for AI Bots

Sure. I had a winning record vs. Iron in the tournament. Both are very strong but within grasp. The hard part is that any success is a bit fleeting; both have very capable and driven authors who will shore up weaknesses very quickly!

dganton Facebook Quietly Enters StarCraft War for AI Bots

The best AIs right now would beat above average folks from the public. But as you start approaching anyone who resembles a professional, bots rapidly turn into practice dummies.

The biggest problems I'm personally facing at the moment are midgame macro with imperfect information -- how many Gateways do I need to be producing from before I can safely take a third base or transition to endgame tech? -- and engaging Terran mech armies. It's very hard to know when or how to engage a Terran mech army, and you usually only get one chance to get it right. Dithering results in bleeding units you can't afford to lose.

The biggest problem in general is that rules-based approaches are asymptoticly approaching the limit of their capabilities. Either of the problems I've described are big undertakings but only scratch the surface of what PurpleWave needs to advance. Machine learning is the way forward. But so far real time strategy games have proved remarkably impenetrable.

Consider that professional players often place their initial buildings to provide Scarab-proof escape routes for their workers against Reaver drops that arrive ten minutes later. Such placements are only effective if you know to react to Reaver drops by funneling your workers through them to glitch the Scarabs. How are you going to let your bot learn that on its own? There's a lot of work to do.

dganton Facebook Quietly Enters StarCraft War for AI Bots

Hi! Author of PurpleWave here. A bit late to the party but happy to answer questions.

dganton Facebook Quietly Enters StarCraft War for AI Bots

Hi Strilanc. Author of PurpleWave here.

That particular scene at the sunken colonies was equally frustrating to watch. I fixed the most likely cause of that behavior shortly after the tournament deadline.

But for sure, you're correct. There's a lot left to do on all fronts. There's noticeable progress every year -- none of last year's entries finished much over 50% -- and the growing research community should help accelerate that even more.

dganton First draft of the new Artificial Intelligence and Games textbook available now

How to efficiently achieve build goals is itself a mostly solved problem. See BOSS by Dave Churchill.

The catch is that "can I build this without dying in the process" is an almost completely unsolved problem. Even "can my opponent just kill me now" is currently only solved by fairly crude approximation. Without being able to evaluate that statically we're nowhere near evaluating it over the course of a build order, accounting for incomplete information and multiple possible responses.

In general, Starcraft is tricky because very small differences in unrelated concerns can cause wild swings in expected outcome. Compare a Terran wall-in that blocks zealots vs. one with a zealot-sized gap. A few pixels of space -- a pathfinding concern -- radically impacts build order concerns.

Come check out the current state-of-the-art (and lots of earlier stage work as well) at http://twitch.tv/sscait

dganton How Web Forums Make Neuroticism Viral

This was a big cause of the death of CampusNetwork, which in 2004-5 was a credible competitor to Facebook. Because it encouraged for campus-wide conversation -- rather than just conversation with your immediate contacts -- it gravitated towards politically extreme conversation that dissuaded mainstream participation. Which is a shame, because it did act as a good way to meet new people, which isn't Facebook's forte.

dganton A History of Starcraft AI Competitions

They sure do have a long way to go. That's what makes it exciting! Real time strategy games are the last frontier for human superiority in competitive games, and it looks to be a generational gap like Chess or Go.

dganton A History of Starcraft AI Competitions

The absence of such techniques is usually due to prioritization rather than ignorance. Most of the time the challenge is just the sheer complexity of basic decisionmaking. The author of this article did a frame-by-frame breakdown of unit attack animation timings, but "should I fight or run" is by itself still an interesting and important question.

The #1 bot as I write this, Iron Bot, has Vulture micro that is in many ways better than any pro, by using frame-perfect patrol kiting.

dganton A History of Starcraft AI Competitions

Hi all. I'm an author of a currently competing Starcraft AI and am pretty familiar with the scene and the techniques used. Happy to answer any questions.

This article is from 2015. Some recent updates: Facebook and Alibaba recently published papers on using pure learning techniques for controlling units, showing great progress while having a ways to go before catching up to traditional techniques. Google DeepMind is collaborating with Blizzard to make these competitions possible for Starcraft 2. And Martin Rooijackers, author of 2016 SSCAIT champion LetaBot, wrote an update on more recent developments: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/521711-berkeley-overmind-20-...

dganton Bringing Wide Color to Instagram

On Windows, I can see the logo on one of my screens, but not the other.

dganton Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

Might be referring to NT

dganton The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

His representatives are generally very lenient on unreleased material and very strict on material that's commercially available.

dganton OS X DNS cache reset script

What's the context of this?

dganton The Triboro: Transit plan for the NYC Boroughs

They can if the supply greatly increases. That's among the reasons why a project longer the Triboro brings so much opportunity. Decentralizing New York real estate would drastically improve affordability.

dganton You Could Almost Do Anything Pt. III

Part of the challenge is that design isn't viewed in isolation. A design leaves an impression on the viewer partly based on how it contrasts with other designs.

A minimalist logo in a sea of embellished logos says "We are smarter and easier to use". A minimalist logo in a sea of minimalist logos says "We are safe and normal."

So following a design trend can be one of the tools you use to design for an audience.

dganton We are Nostalrius, a World of Warcraft fan-made game server. AMA

Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 were something powerful, that we haven't really seen since: A platform for distributed game design and testing.

You could play mods as easily as the game itself. Designers could fork each other's maps. This spawned incredible numbers of games. In addition to the MOBA (League of Legends, DotA) genre, Starcraft 1 mods also popularized the Tower Defense genre (Plants vs. Zombies, Desktop Tower Defense).

It was frustrating to see Blizzard's designers drop the ball with Starcraft 2. The original discovery model -- Host a game with a mod, or see hosted games -- was simple and imperfect, but effective. Blizzard failed to understand why the original system worked, and "fixed" what wasn't broken.

dganton Losing Money

Plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification

dganton Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL

http://ComboDeck.net

I'm building a faster, easier way to search for Magic: the Gathering cards.

The big question: how can you replace a clunky "advanced search" with a simple smart text box?