Yes I am curious of this too. What happens if the human has a giant TV screen that can see the whole map at once

Or, what if we slow down the game, so that the human can actually pause the game each second and consider what to do next. That's basically what the computer is allowed to do

It would massively be faster I think.

Upgrade building 3 comes available when you have enough resources.

A separate tab with insufficient resources gives you an overview with what you need to finish a,b,c.

A red alert appears when an enemy is spotted. You can click nearby units attack or a FSM with the attack strategy.

An finished building automatically will be placed near the town center.

Not working farmers can search for resources.

A wall is suggested by your current buildings, you can set an margin of eg. 20 meters.

The question is, how much programming will the custom UI need ( and how deep) to make it a lot more efficient

Stalker unit AI could be microing perfectly for you...

Giant tv:

Macro-wise, it would be like an unwieldly minimap which already exists so people can get a sense of where the enemy is moving. With a giant screen, information is not focused on a small area, so you are limited to your FOV. Minimap which shows unit strength in terms of armor hp or shields as well as placement would be ideal information.

Micro-wise, it would be like sitting in front of a giant text display looking at a whole book. You still have to focus on a small section to read it.

> Or, what if we slow down the game, so that the human can actually pause the game each second and consider what to do next. That's basically what the computer is allowed to do

While this would make it more fair, it would just make the micro game more similar to chess or go. I don't think humans would necessarily win in the end.

That's a good insight and yes, humans would probably be overpowered eventually. However, this is just the consequence of the fact that all games are similar if you remove external limitations such as reaction time (or, alternatively, produce a more efficient "being" which is not as subject to these limitations as some other).

Starcraft is like chess in some sense. The largest fundamental difference is that it isn't a perfect information game.

Tbh starcraft and dota shouldn’t really be the test games atm; turn based strategies (or rather, grand strategies) would be the far more appropriate evolution after chess and go, since we’re clearly more interested in AI macro than micro, and too much of its learning process is in trying to push the AI beyond micro-oriented thinking (probably many rounds of the AI tournament are lost simply because one AI found a new micro strategy to abuse)

But ofc, there’s no tbs or grand strategy currently out there with a real tournament scene, so you can’t really count on the devs implementing an AI-API, or even properly balanced / bug-free (far more user-testing goes into sc2/dota2 than say civ, simply by virtue of its playerbase).

Yes but a turn based game drastically reduces the action space compared to a real time game, something the DeepMind folks pointed out as a particularly interesting problem they wanted to tackle.

>a turn based game drastically reduces the action space compared to a real time game,

That's the primary benefit imo. The bigger action space is largely composed of non-strategic elements, at least in the sense of long-term strategies, eg micro and mini-skirmish tactics, that I don't think are as interesting. Ofc its clearly a conflict of interest, but my feeling was the most interesting aspect of Go/Chess is the AI making unintuitive discoveries that benefit the long-term. The human-collective machine is pretty good on its own at finding the shorter-term strategies; I don't think AI will make much significant impact in that space.

games as a medium to study upcoming real-world applications (eg cars), RTS makes sense; but as a medium to study AI beating humans, TBS is more appropriate (their ability to explore large search-spaces is far more interesting/potentially impactful). Studying both would be ideal ofc, but in a pick-one situation, TBS is better imo. But only RTS are even really viable atm, which is disappointing.

Well, are we wanting to test the computers ability to strategize/plan, or their ability to out click humans?

The former is an interesting AI challenge/achievement, the latter is a space in which computers are already known to outperform humans.

Even allowing players to zoom out would give huge advantages, that's why no matter the screen size you have to play at the same zoom. There was a bug at one point that allowed players to play multiplayer zoomed out and it was forbidden to use it in competetive games.

How about having multiple humans control the same faction, so one can focus on building, two on a couple of battle groups, another on scouting, etc.? Then they don't have to context switch nearly so much.

They actually have this game mode built in, it's called Archon mode.

Aha, nice, thanks. Let's see, two players per side... not a huge number but probably a big step up from one. Looks like people aren't playing it much; some people suggest it's because that requires a partner.

I would like to see a setup akin to that of Ender Wiggin, with one commander overseeing and recommending overall strategy, and, say, five others managing different areas or groups. That seems like the way to get the best human performance, and might be enough to beat the AIs—at least to nullify chunks of their advantage.