RTS is a bit of a special case because a lot of the skill involved is micromanagement and software is MUCH better at micromanagement than humans.
I don’t expect to see highly sophisticated AI in games (at least adversarial, battle-it-out games) because there is no point. Games have to be fun which means that the goal of the AI is to gracefully lose to the human player after making him exert some effort.
I don’t expect to see highly sophisticated AI in games (at least adversarial, battle-it-out games) because there is no point. Games have to be fun which means that the goal of the AI is to gracefully lose to the human player after making him exert some effort.
I’m not sure about that. A common complaint about these kinds of games is that the AI’s blatantly cheat, especially on higher difficulty levels. I could very well see a market for an AI that could give the human a challenge without cheating.
I’m not sure about that. A common complaint about these kinds of games is that the AI’s blatantly cheat, especially on higher difficulty levels. I could very well see a market for an AI that could give the human a challenge without cheating.
Several years ago, Backgammon AI was at the point where it could absolutely demolish humans without cheating. My impression is that people hated it, and even if they rolled the dice for the AI and input the results themselves they were pretty sure that it had to be cheating somehow.
May have been a vocal minority. You get some people incorrectly complaining about AI cheating in any game that utilizes randomness (Civilization and the new XCOMs are two examples I know of); usually this leads to somebody running a series of tests or decompiling the source code to show people that no, the die rolls are actually fair or (as is commonly the case) actually actively biased in the human player’s favor.
This never stops some people from complaining nonetheless, but a lot of others find the evidence convincing enough and just chalk it up to their own biases (and are less likely to suspect cheating when they play the next game that has random elements).
Right, I meant that Civ doesn’t cheat when it comes to die rolls—e.g. if it displays a 75% chance for the player to win a battle, then the probability really is at least 75%.
That’s why I said “AI that could give the human a challenge” not “AI that would demolish a human”. Better yet, have the game difficulty setting actually control the intelligence of the AI, rather than how much the AI cheats.
What that complaint usually means is “The AI is too hard, I would like easier wins”.
That may be true in some cases, but in many other cases the AI really does cheat, and it cheats because it’s not smart enough to offer a challenge to good players without cheating.
That may be true in some cases, but in many other cases the AI really does cheat
My answer did not imply that the AI doesn’t cheat :-/
The interesting questions here involve the perception of fairness and the illusion of competing with a more-or-less equal in single-player games. When people say the AI cheats they mean that it’s not bound by the rules applied to the human player, but why should it be? Consider MMORGs—do mobs cheat, e.g. by using abilities that the player does not have? Do raid bosses cheat by having a gazillion HP, gaining temporary invulnerability, spawning adds, and generally being a nuisance?
In MMORPGS, the game and setting are usually asymmetrical by design—there’s no assumption that the human knight should have an equal amount of hit points as the ancient dragon, and it would actually violate the logic of the setting if that were the case.
The games where people do complain about AI cheating tend to put the enemies in a more symmetrical role—e.g. in something like Civilization or Starcraft, the game designers work to actively maintain an illusion that the AI players are basically just like human players and operating under the same rules.
If you break that illusion too blatantly, players will be reasonably annoyed, because they feel like the game is telling them one thing when the truth is actually different.
This may even have in-game ramifications: e.g. if I’m playing against a human opponent in a multiplayer match, I might want to keep my units hidden from him so that he doesn’t know what I’m up to, but this is pointless against an AI opponent that sees the entire map all the time. (IIRC, in the original Red Alert, the Soviet player could construct buildings that recreated the shroud of war in areas that the enemy had already explored—and which were totally useless in single player, since the AI was never subject to the shroud of war!) In that case it’s not just the player feeling cheated, it actively screws up the player’s idea of what exactly would be a good idea against the AI.
And yet, humans currently have the edge in Brood War. Humans are probably doomed once StarCraft AIs get AlphaGo-level decision-making, but flawless micro—even on top of flawless* macro—won’t help you if you only have zealots when your opponent does a muta switch. (Zealots can only attack ground and mutalisks fly, so zealots can’t attack mutalisks; mutalisks are also faster than zealots.)
*By flawless, I mean macro doesn’t falter because of micro elsewhere; often, even at the highest levels, players won’t build new units because they’re too busy controlling a big engagement or heavily multitasking (dropping at one point, defending a poke elsewhere, etc). If you look at it broadly, making the correct units is part of macro, but that’s not what I’m talking about when I say flawless macro.
Zealots/muta/dragoons/Hydralisks is just a standard rock/paper/scissors game theory thing, and it shouldn’t be too hard to calculate an approximate nash equlibrium. The problem is that there is micro, macro, game theory, imperfect information, and an AI has to tie all these different aspects together (as well as perhaps some perceptual chunking to reduce the complexity) so its a real challange for combining different cognitive modules. This is too close to AGI for comfort IMO.
flawless micro … won’t help you if you only have zealots when your opponent does a muta switch
Nobody said that flawless micro is sufficient and figuring out the rock/paper/scissors dynamic is not hard. Plus, given that it has enough “attention” for everything, an AI is likely to keep a dancing scout or two around the enemy base and see those mutalisks early enough.
Games have to be fun which means that the goal of the AI is to gracefully lose to the human player after making him exert some effort.
The problem is that most RTS games stand no chance against me or any other half-descent player, unless they are cheating. And when they cheat, the game is very much brute force vs strategy.
I’ve been playing “Ultimate general: Gettysburg”, which was touted as having put a lot off effort into AI, and which paid off—when I play it on the highest difficulty settings, I can still win convincingly, but it does feel like I am playing an incompitant human, rather than an artificial stupidity. Its far more enjoyable to play.
The problem is that most RTS games stand no chance against me or any other half-descent player
Sure. Consider that the game has to run on your sucky home computer (or, forbid, a console), most likely without a GPU. The strategy/tactics/behaviour code has to share the CPU cycles with a large variety of things including the uninteresting but vital functions like pathfinding and it has to make its decisions within the tick time which is a fraction of second. AND many players prefer the AI to be a pushover, anyway.
Of course, the GPU is also running the graphics, but the computer doesn’t need to play well enough to beat world champions—I’m pretty sure that Alpha Go running on one CPU+GPU could play at a strong amateur level.
RTS is a bit of a special case because a lot of the skill involved is micromanagement and software is MUCH better at micromanagement than humans.
The micro capabilities of the AI could be limited so they’re more or less equivalent to a human pro gamer’s, forcing the AI to win via build choice and tactics.
It’s going to be a mess. Even if you, say, limit the AI’s click-per-minute rate, it still has serious advantages. It knows how many fractions of a second can these units stay in the range of enemy artillery and still be able to pull back to recover. It knows whether those units will arrive in time to reinforce the defense or they’ll be too late and should do something else instead.
Build choice is not all that complicated and with tactics you run right into micro.
Human-like uncertainty could be inserted into the AI’s knowledge of those things, but yeah, as you say, it’s going to be a mess. Probably best to pick another kind of game to beat humans at.
RTS is special because it’s realtime. An AI that’s only ‘good enough’ in terms of strategy or tactics could still win by being far better at parallelizing and reaction speed. The bigger the game world, the more this is true.
Human Starcraft players need to have a basic skill of taking hundreds of actions per minute before they can bring their superior strategy or tactics into play.
I just meant that if it wasn’t realtime but turn-based, AIs would lose their advantage.
Most games are real-time: FPSes, MMORGs, MOBAs, etc.
And in all of these, AFAIK, when AI is better than humans, it’s because it can do things humans simply can’t: perfect aiming and movement (of the kind that’s considered cheating when humans use software aids to achieve it in FPSs), coordinating a team that can’t see each other because sharing info digitally over the ‘chat’ channel is very efficient, remembering perfectly a very complex maze, etc. Micromanagement is another of these.
That computers are much better at some things than humans isn’t a surprise. It’s very important, but it’s hard to compare it directly to games like Go or chess.
Humans also can’t run massive searches on deep trees or hold a huge library of opening moves in their memory.
AIs solve problems differently from humans. Software is much better at some things (from micromanagement to aimbotting to doing things quickly) and is much worse, so far, at other things. The interesting place is the edge—where software and human capabiilties are currently of the same magnitude. That’s why aimbots are boring and a machine playing Go is oh so cool.
RTS is a bit of a special case because a lot of the skill involved is micromanagement and software is MUCH better at micromanagement than humans.
I don’t expect to see highly sophisticated AI in games (at least adversarial, battle-it-out games) because there is no point. Games have to be fun which means that the goal of the AI is to gracefully lose to the human player after making him exert some effort.
You might be interested in Angband Borg.
I’m not sure about that. A common complaint about these kinds of games is that the AI’s blatantly cheat, especially on higher difficulty levels. I could very well see a market for an AI that could give the human a challenge without cheating.
Several years ago, Backgammon AI was at the point where it could absolutely demolish humans without cheating. My impression is that people hated it, and even if they rolled the dice for the AI and input the results themselves they were pretty sure that it had to be cheating somehow.
May have been a vocal minority. You get some people incorrectly complaining about AI cheating in any game that utilizes randomness (Civilization and the new XCOMs are two examples I know of); usually this leads to somebody running a series of tests or decompiling the source code to show people that no, the die rolls are actually fair or (as is commonly the case) actually actively biased in the human player’s favor.
This never stops some people from complaining nonetheless, but a lot of others find the evidence convincing enough and just chalk it up to their own biases (and are less likely to suspect cheating when they play the next game that has random elements).
The Civ 5 AI does cheat insofar as it doesn’t have to deal with the fog of war, IIRC.
The XCOM AI seems to cheat because they’ve don’t report the actual probability.
Not just that, especially on higher difficulty levels.
Right, I meant that Civ doesn’t cheat when it comes to die rolls—e.g. if it displays a 75% chance for the player to win a battle, then the probability really is at least 75%.
It does cheat in a number of other ways.
That’s why I said “AI that could give the human a challenge” not “AI that would demolish a human”. Better yet, have the game difficulty setting actually control the intelligence of the AI, rather than how much the AI cheats.
What that complaint usually means is “The AI is too hard, I would like easier wins”.
And you think the game industry is blind and does not see that market?
That may be true in some cases, but in many other cases the AI really does cheat, and it cheats because it’s not smart enough to offer a challenge to good players without cheating.
My answer did not imply that the AI doesn’t cheat :-/
The interesting questions here involve the perception of fairness and the illusion of competing with a more-or-less equal in single-player games. When people say the AI cheats they mean that it’s not bound by the rules applied to the human player, but why should it be? Consider MMORGs—do mobs cheat, e.g. by using abilities that the player does not have? Do raid bosses cheat by having a gazillion HP, gaining temporary invulnerability, spawning adds, and generally being a nuisance?
In MMORPGS, the game and setting are usually asymmetrical by design—there’s no assumption that the human knight should have an equal amount of hit points as the ancient dragon, and it would actually violate the logic of the setting if that were the case.
The games where people do complain about AI cheating tend to put the enemies in a more symmetrical role—e.g. in something like Civilization or Starcraft, the game designers work to actively maintain an illusion that the AI players are basically just like human players and operating under the same rules.
If you break that illusion too blatantly, players will be reasonably annoyed, because they feel like the game is telling them one thing when the truth is actually different.
This may even have in-game ramifications: e.g. if I’m playing against a human opponent in a multiplayer match, I might want to keep my units hidden from him so that he doesn’t know what I’m up to, but this is pointless against an AI opponent that sees the entire map all the time. (IIRC, in the original Red Alert, the Soviet player could construct buildings that recreated the shroud of war in areas that the enemy had already explored—and which were totally useless in single player, since the AI was never subject to the shroud of war!) In that case it’s not just the player feeling cheated, it actively screws up the player’s idea of what exactly would be a good idea against the AI.
And yet, humans currently have the edge in Brood War. Humans are probably doomed once StarCraft AIs get AlphaGo-level decision-making, but flawless micro—even on top of flawless* macro—won’t help you if you only have zealots when your opponent does a muta switch. (Zealots can only attack ground and mutalisks fly, so zealots can’t attack mutalisks; mutalisks are also faster than zealots.)
*By flawless, I mean macro doesn’t falter because of micro elsewhere; often, even at the highest levels, players won’t build new units because they’re too busy controlling a big engagement or heavily multitasking (dropping at one point, defending a poke elsewhere, etc). If you look at it broadly, making the correct units is part of macro, but that’s not what I’m talking about when I say flawless macro.
Zealots/muta/dragoons/Hydralisks is just a standard rock/paper/scissors game theory thing, and it shouldn’t be too hard to calculate an approximate nash equlibrium. The problem is that there is micro, macro, game theory, imperfect information, and an AI has to tie all these different aspects together (as well as perhaps some perceptual chunking to reduce the complexity) so its a real challange for combining different cognitive modules. This is too close to AGI for comfort IMO.
Pretty sure it’s still comfortably narrow AI. People used to think that chess required AGI-levels of intelligence, too.
Nobody said that flawless micro is sufficient and figuring out the rock/paper/scissors dynamic is not hard. Plus, given that it has enough “attention” for everything, an AI is likely to keep a dancing scout or two around the enemy base and see those mutalisks early enough.
The problem is that most RTS games stand no chance against me or any other half-descent player, unless they are cheating. And when they cheat, the game is very much brute force vs strategy.
I’ve been playing “Ultimate general: Gettysburg”, which was touted as having put a lot off effort into AI, and which paid off—when I play it on the highest difficulty settings, I can still win convincingly, but it does feel like I am playing an incompitant human, rather than an artificial stupidity. Its far more enjoyable to play.
Sure. Consider that the game has to run on your sucky home computer (or, forbid, a console), most likely without a GPU. The strategy/tactics/behaviour code has to share the CPU cycles with a large variety of things including the uninteresting but vital functions like pathfinding and it has to make its decisions within the tick time which is a fraction of second. AND many players prefer the AI to be a pushover, anyway.
I think gaming machines generally do have GPUs…
Of course, the GPU is also running the graphics, but the computer doesn’t need to play well enough to beat world champions—I’m pretty sure that Alpha Go running on one CPU+GPU could play at a strong amateur level.
Of course, but mass-market games like Starcraft are designed to perform decently on the run-of-the-mill machines with integrated graphics.
The micro capabilities of the AI could be limited so they’re more or less equivalent to a human pro gamer’s, forcing the AI to win via build choice and tactics.
It’s going to be a mess. Even if you, say, limit the AI’s click-per-minute rate, it still has serious advantages. It knows how many fractions of a second can these units stay in the range of enemy artillery and still be able to pull back to recover. It knows whether those units will arrive in time to reinforce the defense or they’ll be too late and should do something else instead.
Build choice is not all that complicated and with tactics you run right into micro.
Make the AI control a robot that looks at a physical screen and operates a physical mouse. Then it will be fair. ;)
The point of the exercise is NOT to devise a handicapping system which will produce a fair match.
Human-like uncertainty could be inserted into the AI’s knowledge of those things, but yeah, as you say, it’s going to be a mess. Probably best to pick another kind of game to beat humans at.
Or the game could be played on its slowest mode.
RTS is special because it’s realtime. An AI that’s only ‘good enough’ in terms of strategy or tactics could still win by being far better at parallelizing and reaction speed. The bigger the game world, the more this is true.
Human Starcraft players need to have a basic skill of taking hundreds of actions per minute before they can bring their superior strategy or tactics into play.
Something like this?
Most games are real-time: FPSes, MMORGs, MOBAs, etc.
Right.
I just meant that if it wasn’t realtime but turn-based, AIs would lose their advantage.
And in all of these, AFAIK, when AI is better than humans, it’s because it can do things humans simply can’t: perfect aiming and movement (of the kind that’s considered cheating when humans use software aids to achieve it in FPSs), coordinating a team that can’t see each other because sharing info digitally over the ‘chat’ channel is very efficient, remembering perfectly a very complex maze, etc. Micromanagement is another of these.
That computers are much better at some things than humans isn’t a surprise. It’s very important, but it’s hard to compare it directly to games like Go or chess.
Humans also can’t run massive searches on deep trees or hold a huge library of opening moves in their memory.
AIs solve problems differently from humans. Software is much better at some things (from micromanagement to aimbotting to doing things quickly) and is much worse, so far, at other things. The interesting place is the edge—where software and human capabiilties are currently of the same magnitude. That’s why aimbots are boring and a machine playing Go is oh so cool.