Super interesting to watch this unfold. So what game should AI tackle next? I've heard imperfect information games are harder for AI...would the AlphaGo approach not work well for these?
I think for perfect information board games Go is the pinnacle, at least among the human-played. (the field of general game-playing AIs makes up all kinds of crazy games that might be "harder" in one way or the other)
If you look for an RTS game, StarCraft is an obvious candidate. It has a relatively active community of AI writers and AI competitions, it's a classic of competitive play, ...
Real-time games are hard to compare, because the interface really makes a difference. Does the AI get to talk directly to the game engine? Or does it have to use screen capture, understand the image and then use a robot arm to press keys, or something in between? If it gets to see precise positions and to input commands directly, even relatively "simple" programs can do crazy micro tricks and get massive advantages that way, even if their general macro-strategy is bad. If you do the other way you need image analysis and robotics, Google should have the tech for both ;)
No, after StarCraft they suggested 3D games (eg: Call of Duty, ...). Mind you, this is playing based on the pixels, not based on direct access to the game structures as bots do today.
The from playing Call of Duty to controling a robot with a gun in the real world it's a small step :)
I don't like the idea of FPS'. We'd expect them to behave the humans when they play FPS - they run looking forward and will occasionally look left or right and follow some predetermined pathing that they are familiar with.
With an AI, if we base it on pixels, what they will do is spin around 360 degrees about 60 times a second while moving forward so that it can maximize all of the pixels inputted at a time. It would compare it against the stored level design and shoot at anything that is off (or against character models). I can just see that it's not going to behave like anything we'd expect.
The same would likely be true of an RTS. An AI could scroll the viewport around and click units to issue orders at ludicrous speeds. Even if it had to use the same interface as a human, it'd still have a huge mechanical advantage.
Starcraft is definitely up there. No-limit texas holdem poker is also very difficult.
After that... then we have games that involve physical movement. Although I'm not sure what would be fair for strength & speed of robots vs humans. I'm imagining a team of robot soccer players, for example.
One perfect-information game that's at least as hard: constructive mathematics. (Proof assistants even give it a sort of videogame-style UI.) I've been wondering about some kind of neural net for ranking the 'moves' coupled with the usual proof search.
I don't know much about Go but I'm guessing general proof automation would be many, many orders of magnitudes harder. The branching factor is huge (you can apply any theorem you want to the current goal and go down a bad path) and knowing if you're on the right track to finish a proof isn't obvious.
If they make a decent AI for Total War I'd be impressed. Or an AI in Civilization that doesn't cheat. But of course requiring a mini-datacenter in hardware and time to think (probably seconds) would make it unrealistic for both.
