>The big advancement in alphago is that by using deep learning it is able to evaluate different board-states without doing any search, using a neural net.
It still uses a Monte-Carlo Tree Search to get to the level where it can beat human pro players.
>Starcraft is real-time, there are tons of different actions you can take, the actions are not independent (pressing attack does something different if you have a unit selected or not), the game state is not fully known and a given state can mean different things depending on what preceeded it.
And yet StarCraft is extremely primitive as far as strategy games go. Most of the stuff you can do in the game simply doesn't matter, and the stuff that matters could be modeled at a much coarser level than what people see on the screen. Knowing how this stuff works, I'm willing to bet this is exactly how Deep Mind will approach the problem. They will try many different sets of hand-engineered features and game representations, then not mention any of the failed efforts in their press releases and research papers.
The choice of StarCraft as their next target reeks of a PR stunt. Sure, there might be no AIs that play at pro level now, but there wasn't any serious effort or incentive to build one either, and now Google will throw millions of dollars and a data-center worth of hardware at this problem.
As far as I'm concerned, real AI research right now isn't about surpassing human performance at tasks where computers are already doing okay. It's about achieving reasonable level of performance in domains where computers are doing extremely badly. But that won't get you a lot of coverage from the clueless tech press, I guess.
What are their other options besides Starcraft2? This doesn’t seem like a PR stunt (not that the PR isn’t a bonus), but there’s already a history of AI competitions for Brood War, the game is more balanced than arguably any other RTS, and even though it is “primitive” as a strategy game in your estimation, AI isn’t ready to tackle a more advanced strategy game.
It uses MCTS, but that's not the same thing as the claim, now is it? If you look at the win rates in the AG paper for the NN vs MCTS+NN and then consider the performance curve, use of a single TPU, crushing superiority of Master's flawless 60 blitz matches and Ke Jie matches despite very fast moves, the released self-play matches, and comparing with FB's Dark Forest, it's clear that the AG NN all on its own, without any MCTS, is a truly formidable player that would likely crush many pros, although I don't know if it would reach Sedol or Ke Jie levels of play.
It still uses a Monte-Carlo Tree Search to get to the level where it can beat human pro players.
>Starcraft is real-time, there are tons of different actions you can take, the actions are not independent (pressing attack does something different if you have a unit selected or not), the game state is not fully known and a given state can mean different things depending on what preceeded it.
And yet StarCraft is extremely primitive as far as strategy games go. Most of the stuff you can do in the game simply doesn't matter, and the stuff that matters could be modeled at a much coarser level than what people see on the screen. Knowing how this stuff works, I'm willing to bet this is exactly how Deep Mind will approach the problem. They will try many different sets of hand-engineered features and game representations, then not mention any of the failed efforts in their press releases and research papers.
The choice of StarCraft as their next target reeks of a PR stunt. Sure, there might be no AIs that play at pro level now, but there wasn't any serious effort or incentive to build one either, and now Google will throw millions of dollars and a data-center worth of hardware at this problem.
As far as I'm concerned, real AI research right now isn't about surpassing human performance at tasks where computers are already doing okay. It's about achieving reasonable level of performance in domains where computers are doing extremely badly. But that won't get you a lot of coverage from the clueless tech press, I guess.