Or it might find a new strategy that is totally imbalanced and unbeatable
The challenge lies in making the computer comprehend such decisions.
I think the difficulty of interpreting the information and the act of information gathering itself as a basis for planning and decision making is hard.
I've recently read Ender's Game and there was an interesting idea in there. In the book it is hive queens controlling the Buggers fleet with exquisite control, yet Ender is able to exploit this as a weakness, as every human is a sentient being capable of thinking and acting independently, so as a commander he was only giving high-level orders to his lieutenants and they did the rest. Which is how humans have fought wars.
Game designers spend a lot of effort in RTS game keeping the AI from crushing people. This showes up not just in the games AI but also unit mechanics. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mHbloVZ15Pc
EX: Often there are units capable of infinite harassment with perfect micro. That's so far from being fun it's never part of actual game AI.
Large base, small waves. It's a simple formula that makes people feel great!
PS: Of course it goes deeper, units need to have basic AI because people can't micro manage large numbers.
Starcraft 2 has a mode like this called Archon Mode, where two players control the same units. The conflicts that can arise from this can be pretty fun to witness.
http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Team_Melee
http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Archon_Mode
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/314e28/archon_mo...
I've read enough about real-world military strategy on Quora to know that this is nonsense. The amount of national resources that go into command and control networks is immense, these networks play a huge role in making our military unassailable. Something like the Bugger hive queens would be practically impossible to deal with in any real way, deception would be impossible to rely on.
Deception is critical in an invasion, defenders have the advantage of knowing the terrain. If you could rely on a sensor network to reliably and instantaneously tell you where all the threats are, then you could simply rely on mobile forces to go wherever they're needed. Unless the attackers have an overwhelming numerical advantage, they won't be able to break through.
D-Day would not have been feasible without the ability to deceive the Germans as to which beaches they were going to land the troops, a lot of time and effort went into planning that deception.
Humans only stood a chance against the buggers due to their overwhelming weaponry, which will trump tactics and strategy every time. No way with that kind of weaponry would it even be a fair fight, any mildly competent general could have won with that advantage. The defensive response to overwhelming conventional superiority is guerrilla warfare, not trying to stand and fight toe-to-toe with nukes.
Felt like a bit of a cop-out to me, authors should be required to spend some time on Quora verifying their basic assumptions, it would make for much better stories. Naturally Card didn't have access to it, and I still enjoyed the book. But it could have been much much better.
I've learned more about the real world around us from Quora than I have from almost every other source. Only Stratfor rivals it, and that's only in the realm of geopolitics.
Of course, you'd learn more at an actual military academy about strategy, but Quora does the work of getting the people that already went to those academies to boil down everything they learned into short, readable essays.
In fact, I'm finding that I'm reading fewer long-form journalism articles and blogs because I find Quora so compelling. Those were my previous bar-none best source for information.
Nothing beats curated long-form journalism for variety, but there's still a lot of noise and the work of separating it out is onerous enough and Quora is easy enough that I've already subconsciously switched, not bothering to maintain my RSS workflows. If I want some variety, I'll fire up Feedly or Pocket and pull out a few articles, but generally I'm looking to iterate on my high-level model of how the world works, geopolitical analysis from Stratfor and watching smart people answer stupid questions at Quora is the best bang-for-the-buck I've encountered for that. HN is the best place for business-specific information, if it weren't for that I'd have moved on a long time ago, I've been so far unable to find a good vein to mine for business on Quora, though it's half-decent with finance, though HN still beats Quora there too.
With Starcraft, you can throw sheer processing power at strategic decisions. If you're able to fast-simulate gameplay, even just on the order 10's of thousands of possibilities a second would give you a decent feel for overall strategic decisions. Sure, some nonlinearity might throw a result off by a huge factor, and you wouldn't have searched that. The opponent, human or AI, is faced with the same challenge, though. In the end, no one can predict the future because of chaotic nonlinearities. The best we can do is best account for the odds.
A unit's position is a function of 3 _probably_ 32bits numbers, giving 2^96 discrete positions.
You can get that number much higher probably, by adding other factors like current speed, orientation, etc.
You're right though that you have to tackle the problem differently, because while you'll be able to try to define a strategy in go by iterating over a bunch of discrete possibilities in the 19x19 grid, there is no way you can do that for a 2^hundreds size grid with current tech.
I guess AlphaGo is in for a few semesters on strange attractors!
After a certain points they got really annoying to play against - it was always doing small scale harassment and evading with a perfect equation so you couldn't really ever catch it (unless you had much faster units). Besides actions per minute constraints, to be playable the AI at least should have some kind of reaction delay like humans have.
It could be as subtle as using the player's apm or other activity metrics as a proxy for enjoyment, if correlations were shown in play testing labs. This could allow for more training data, and less annoyance to users, who might be reluctant to provide manual ratings.
The next step after that is adaptive AI, where the computer learns what you find enjoyable personally.
I give it ten years before this is how every game works.
Edit: Google has said that negative signals are extremely important to its search. A user bypassing the #1 result for the #2 is hugely bad for #1, but only a mild boost for #2. Similarly, perhaps minimizing "ragequit"s is a valid objective!
Starcraft has three races and random. At top pro levels, picking random is unheard of and actually extremely difficult to play against because it complicates your very early decisions.
Im also interested in who would be picked to play against DeepCraft. Flash would be incredible but he's retired. I'm curious which top level talent will be left by the time the bot is ready to play
As an aside, the "best player in the world" referred to in the article is the SC2 player SoS. I think Zest is pretty commonly viewed as best in the world right now, even if he loses the current GSL. They mentioned SoS because... he won blizzcon?!
You might think that's unfair to the computer, but we're also not requiring the computer use a mouse and keyboard, so we're actually giving it an advantage. I mean, if Starcraft were programmed such that I could control every unit with my mind instantaneously, I'd also do better than a human trying to toggle through hotkeys and micro with the constraints of a mouse/keyboard interface.
The thing is, a game needs to be very carefully balanced for these scissor/paper/rock dynamics to emerge. This type of balance is not the default --- it's the product of careful design, and empirical tuning.
In human vs AI, this balance will almost surely be broken. The AI will have perfect control, even with APM constraints. Its attention can be split between two attacks perfectly. It won't play at all like a human.
So, the resulting human vs AI gameplay is unlikely to be strategically deep. If the AI can learn to play Starcraft at all competently, it will probably crush. It will probably find a dominant strategy that it can re-execute exactly the same every time, which the human can't stop.
Making the AI work well for Starcraft will be very difficult. In Chess and Go the actions are discrete; in Starcraft the actions are all analog. But the gameplay requires much deeper search than the Atari games Deepmind learned in its early paper. So I think the game will be very difficult for the AI. But not for the reasons people are talking about.