

8-Button StarCraft lets the AI take care of the complexity - tantalor
http://bgweber.com/8-button-starcraft

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cloudkj
Not sure how good this AI would be. It pretty much delegates micromanagement
and lets the user make high-level decisions. However, it doesn't seem fine
grained enough to handle different situations. The fact that the 8 buttons
include unit names is slightly worrying; is this is specifically for Protoss?
What if a reaver drop is the current optimal plan of attack? What about
scouting? There were no scout units at all. The video just shows the person
clicking "attack" and the zealots/dragoons automatically moving towards the
enemy base, so maybe the "black sheep wall" cheat is presumed to be enabled.
Scouting is one of the most important tactics. How would the system deal with
cloaked units, etc? It just seems like a helper system that does trivial
things like executing a standard build order, assigning probes to resources,
etc.

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yosho
Yah this is kinda cool, but hardly practical in terms of any real game play.

Also, I think the beauty of starcraft is that it is extremely hard to master
due to the complexity involved. Like chess, there are standard opening moves
but beyond the initial sequences, the possibilities are almost endless.

I would like to see someone program a computer who could beat the best
starcraft player. I bet that would make the IBM Deep Blue seem like a joke.

~~~
borisk
>>I would like to see someone program a computer who could beat the best
starcraft player. I bet that would make the IBM Deep Blue seem like a joke.

Deep Blue is ancient, modern chess programs make it look like a joke ;-)

In SC a program can abuse early some insane micromanagement to win before any
hard strategy/positional decisions have to be made.

~~~
csytan
Not true.

There is a trade off between speed and economy when doing an early rush. The
attacking player will always have less attacking units than the defensive
player due to the travel distance between bases. (Assuming the defensive
player is prepared for the rush)

In addition, by the time any first tier attacking units reach you, it's always
possible to have a defensive structure, which can deal fairly well with any
sort of micromangement.

~~~
borisk
>> There is a trade off between speed and economy when doing an early rush.
The attacking player will always have less attacking units than the defensive
player due to the travel distance between bases. (Assuming the defensive
player is prepared for the rush)

The attacking AI can abuse it's much much higher APM to do a lot of damage
with less units. Like killing workers with zealots, zerglings or vultures.

>>In addition, by the time any first tier attacking units reach you, it's
always possible to have a defensive structure, which can deal fairly well with
any sort of micromangement.

Defensive structures are 1. expensive and 2. can be bypassed. An AI can use
the same resources, human spent on defense, to expand or tech, easily winning
the game.

~~~
cloudkj
Just wanted to point out that it's pretty silly to talk about an AI's APM,
since its APM is infinite (bounded by hardware limits like clock speed, etc).

~~~
borisk
Just wanted to point out that it's pretty silly to say that infinite = bounded
;-)

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_delirium
Reminds me of the approach Master of Orion 3 took, sort of out of necessity:
they found they had built a game with such absurd micromanagement that they
had to add some AI managers to do some of the lowest-level "playing" for you
in order to make the game actually interesting/enjoyable.

~~~
jmaygarden
They failed miserably as I recall. It was a glorified screen saver.

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thalur
Why is everyone bashing the AI? Its clearly a joke from the first two
sentences of the post:

"John Davison recently claimed that games are "Too Big and Too Hard". I have
addressed this issue by reducing StarCraft to 8 buttons."

Or is it too early in the morning for satire?

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PStamatiou
"Ben Weber is a Ph.D. candidate working with Michael Mateas in the Expressive
Intelligence Studio at the University of California, Santa Cruz."

Heh, small world. Michael Mateas was my CS2260 professor at Georgia Tech and I
was in the last class he taught before Michael left for Santa Cruz. For those
wondering, 2260 was Media Device Architectures, a class based around coding
for the GameBoy Advance. Here was part of the game I made for our final
project: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/pauls/133005425/>

course: <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2006/cs2260_spring/>

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diziet
The point of playing starcraft is to actually do all that "boring"
macromanagement staff. That is a big bulk of the game, and certainly what
separates players of different skill levels.

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jasonkester
As long as you're abstracting out the human interaction, why not go whole hog
and let the AI decide when to click those 8 buttons for you?

You can replace them all with one big button labeled "Play Starcraft", then
sit back and watch it win for you. Like this:

<http://progressquest.com/>

~~~
jcl
From the article: "In the fully realized system, EISBot, the AI decides which
buttons need to be pressed."

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drblast
The really cool thing here is if you click a few links in the article, you
find an API to write your own Starcraft AI, and a competition for them.

This is the ultimate programming game!

<http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/>

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avar
Wow, someone built the system I was advocating for 3 months ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1495760>

Awesome.

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RodgerTheGreat
It's rather interesting that he chose the faction requiring the least
micromanagement, at least as far as base-building. Seems like a pretty neat
tech demo, though.

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fsniper
So this AI tries to micromanage for you. But I could not get the game play
here. You build a building and put it into a "build unit for me" mode. But
what about the "attack mode?" why should AI decide where and when to attack?
Doesn't this make game play just some sort of child play or a "logistics"
game? I supply buildings and units, and AI decides the real strategy?

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robfitz
Hard to read in the video -- the buttons are:

Zealot | Dragoon | Observer | Reaver | Carrier Attack | Defend | Expand

The expand button is my favorite...

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simonsarris
Except maybe defend, I think every single one of these would lose to Cannon ->
DT rush.

