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Re:Tencent's AI plays StarCraft II, and wins over 90 percent... by TulliusCicero on Friday September 21, 2018 @11:48AM (#18040552)
The article is talking about their AI crushing other AI's, not humans. There aren't any AI's right now that can beat high level human players, even with superhuman reflexes and control.

> AI has crushed humans in Go, the most complicated (widely played) board game.

In terms of ruleset, Starcraft is at least a few orders of magnitude more complicated than Go. It doesn't feel more complicated to humans, really, but the sheer number of variables at play is vastly higher.

Re:Tencent's AI plays StarCraft II, and wins over 90 percent... by jtolmar on Friday September 21, 2018 @01:18PM (#18041180)
Brood War has a significantly higher branching factor than Go: each of ~50 units can receive 3 orders with arbitrary targets (the untargetted ones hardly matter for branching). The map is 4096 x 4096 pixels, though some of those are functionally identical so say 256 (the number of angles a unit can face). So branching factor around 38400. The game runs at 24 fps, and the average game is 20 minutes long, for 480 turns. 38400^480 is a number with 2201 digits.

Starcraft II runs at a higher frame rate and uses higher resolution maps, so these numbers are even more ridiculous there.

Re:Tencent's AI plays StarCraft II, and wins over 90 percent... by TulliusCicero on Friday September 21, 2018 @04:02PM (#18042244)
> game runs at 24 fps, and the average game is 20 minutes long, for 480 turns.

Messed up your conversion there, fps is seconds and you had game length in minutes, so need to multiply by 60. So that's 28,800 "turns".

Re:Tencent's AI plays StarCraft II, and wins over 90 percent... by KevinCarbonara on Friday September 21, 2018 @01:21PM (#18041197)
Starcraft 2 is not "orders of magnitude more complicated than Go". It's far less complicated in terms of options, and far more complicated in terms of factors like speed/reaction time that don't exist in Go. Those things are difficult to compare at all, but certainly do not qualify as "orders of magnitude", which is measurable.
Re:Tencent's AI plays StarCraft II, and wins over 90 percent... by TulliusCicero on Friday September 21, 2018 @03:57PM (#18042217)
It absolutely is, which is partly why there aren't any good AI's for it yet, even though we have ones that can crush the best players in the world at Go.

Go's game state, for example, is very small. You can pretty much represent it with a 19x19 array of 2-bit variables, because each space only has three possible states. That's only 722 bits. Maybe a few more to track whose turn it is and how many pieces each player has remaining.

In contrast, Starcraft can have hundreds of units in play from dozens of types, each of which usually has at least a position value (x and y) and a health value, and commonly has other things like energy value and cooldown values. And each of these you'd need at least a 16-bit int. And that doesn't even get into the enormously larger possible action space for each "turn".

Re:Tencent's AI plays StarCraft II, and wins over 90 percent... by ZeroBugBounce on Friday September 21, 2018 @02:01PM (#18041487)
> It's far less complicated in terms of options

Could you explain how you figure that in more detail?

I mean, to my untrained eye, it sounds like it wouldn't be so, since in every time slice of the game (equiv. of a turn in Go?) you can have hundreds of points of control - hundreds of levers to choose to pull - and of course that's in every frame (or whatever interval the UI actually allows you input).