Losing the computer in StarCraft has been a tradition of mine since the first game came out in 1998. Of course, the built-in “AI” is trivial for serious players to beat, and for years researchers have attempted to replicate human strategy and skill in the latest version of the game. They’ve jus…
Losing to the computer in StarCraft has been a tradition of mine since the first game came out in 1998. Of course, the built-in “AI” is trivial for serious players to beat, and for years researchers have attempted to replicate human strategy and skill in the latest version of the game. They’ve just made a huge leap with AlphaStar, which recently beat two leading pros 5-0.
The new system was created by DeepMind, and in many ways it’s very unlike what you might call a “traditional” StarCraft AI. The computer opponents you can select in the game are really pretty dumb — they have basic built-in strategies, and know in general how to attack and defend and how to progress down the tech tree. But they lack everything that makes a human player strong: adaptability, improvisation and imagination.
AlphaStar is different. It learned from watching humans play at first, but soon honed its skills by playing against facets of itself.
The first iterations watched replays of games to learn the basics of “micro” (i.e. controlling units effectively) and “macro” (i.e. game economy and long-term goals) strategy. With this knowledge it was able to beat the in-game computer opponents on their hardest setting 95 percent of the time. But as any pro will tell you, that’s child’s play. So the real work started here.
Because StarCraft is such a complex game, it would be silly to think that there’s a single optimal strategy that works in all situations. So the machine learning agent was essentially split into hundreds of versions of itself, each given a slightly different task or strategy. One might attempt to achieve air superiority at all costs; another to focus on teching up; another to try various “cheese” attempts like worker rushes and the like.
