They better keep fog of war on too.

APM is a huge indicator of Starcraft "skill". Its not the only thing of course, but winning "micro-battles" greatly changes the game.

I don't care how good Michael Jordan is. He'll never "win" a game of basketball vs a standard professional by shouting commands to an average joe.

Similarly, no average joe will be able to perform a muta-harass while retaining full-speed, taking only a single missile from a Turret. That sort of "micro-skill" takes practice and dexterity.

http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Team_Melee

Too bad, it's really good.

DeepMind's system is all about finding patterns. It might do better on those aspects. It could even be trained to recognize some aspects of enemy intent, how the battles are going, etc. Thing is, there's lots of potentials for curveballs in Starcraft compared to Go or Atari games. Human pro's curveball on demand. Should be interesting to see what it can do.

I'm now thinking more explicitly of the book series I alluded to (The General series by S.M. Stirling and David Drake): the human is a commander, so the units are intelligent in their own right (thus, handled by the AI); and the AI is also giving the human commander real-time advice based on what knowledge it can discover through the human's vision (isolated from the other AI-instance doing micro, but "smart" in the sense that it can assume that the micro is being done by a [fallible] rational actor that thinks like it does.)

I feel like that "human in the middle" configuration would actually make for its own new subgenre of 4X/RTS-like games, if we could get it right; somewhat like a more interesting version of tower defense. Like an RTS, it would be about issuing orders; like a MOBA, you'd have direct control of a "champion" unit. But the job of the unit would be to give those orders, and your job as the player would be to get their position fortified while also gaining enough information to accurately strategize.

Come to think of it, this is what Dungeons & Dragons was originally supposed to be about, wasn't it? Commander-level characters going off to do scouting or other special ops for their army, advancing in rank and gaining underlings in the process. (D&D1e assumes you'll just already have a wargame going with an overworld hex grid, unit stats, etc., and just serves as a "what heroes do in a zoomed-in view" add-on to it. Thus why it doesn't come with its own battle system.)

I see what you're saying. Yes, I daydreamed about such models too. I got excited about two games that stepped into that direction: Supreme Commander's dual-monitor setup with a macro, commander-like view plus detailed, micro view; Full Spectrum Warrior and Full Spectrum Command. The S.C. setup shows people are dabbling in interfaces that might lead to that. FSW and FSC are straight implementations of what you describe: commanders controlling AI agents that are semi-autonomous and provide feedback. FSC isn't available to public but is what I wanted more: limited commander view with data on your troops, position, intel coming in from video feeds or satellite, and so on. A hybrid model might let me go Harbinger and "assume direct control" of a character or team.

"I feel like that "human in the middle" configuration would actually make for its own new subgenre of 4X/RTS-like games, if we could get it right; "

It could. I'm not sure what it will look like outside Full Spectrum Command or bots in shooter games. A lot of the experience comes from the style of the people playing plus their quirks. The Call of Duty Ghosts AI shows that we might be able to approximate that as it did it so well I thought I was playing online against rookies lol. Most fun bots ever were.

"Come to think of it, this is what Dungeons & Dragons was originally supposed to be about, wasn't it? "

I think it was meant to enable and constrain the imaginations of players so the game took place inside their head. I never played it but it was a brilliant idea. Come to think of it, you're onto something here because games like Skyrim have all kinds of autonomous people doing certain routines or behaving in certain ways. There's even contractors and mayors. Any of these people could benefit from AI. Just a matter of computing resources. Could have one world where everyone plays the same world whose characters are controlled via a server farm at developer's location. I originally envisioned that for Runescape when I failed to get them to create a version of it for AI research. It would've been great for testing pathfinding, build systems, strategy, chatterbots, and so on. Skyrim more so.

Note: We could also test a collective intelligence where individual agents publish what they learn to central forums organized by topic. AI expansions could take time to periodically scrape that, try to understand it, and factor it into their gameplay. Basically, simulating player help forums that humans use. Additionally, could build superintelligences, gods, or advanced/E.T. AI's that tap into that plus much of world state that shouldn't be available. Even let them make changes to map or items with that dynamic factored in.

Lots of potential that might not have been explored yet but could make even simpler bots a lot more fun to watch. ;)

also the APM is not unlimited, it is only very high.

I think this really demonstrates why putting in APM limits is super important, and as brought out elsewhere also making the computer input via mouse/keyboard and get data from the screen (maybe just a filter to ease up on the CV bits?). A lot of the fun in watching a StarCraft map is seeing how the big picture is balanced against the details, and where a person's limited congnition flows from one focus to another. Limited knowledge and scope of sight play a huge part in the skill.

But mostly I'm just ranting because dodging the splash damage feels unfair; goes against everything I stand for. Next we'll start seeing 5 Skill Rays bulldoze the map! (I'm going to be looking into this a lot more after work - it seems like a super cool project!)

I mean, what would an AI come up with given just mass zerglings vs mass zerglings. Would love to see the strategies possible with near unlimited attention and APM.

For example, while banelings, are considered hard-counter to marines, stimpacked marines are still faster than even speed-banelings not on creep and just a little bit slower on creep. Pros use splitting to minimize damage, but here, as you can see, it can be just ultimate showdown.

Another example would be high templars vs ghosts. It is fairly difficult for Terran player to target high templars, but just two EMP shots basically puts templars out of combat, and miss of those shots renders ghosts mostly useless.

So, any area-of-effect attacks would be mostly useless due to infinite APM. That means minus colossi, tanks, banelings, thors and many other units. Probably that means that some race will be somewhat (or, maybe, insanely) overpowered (my bet is on Terran due to possibility of multiple drops, which themselves could be useless, though (because AI can't "miss" a drop), and stim-marine micro). So, the game will require massive rebalancing.

Or maybe it is because opponent is also AI and automaton simply knows which target it will auto pick.