| Awhile. This just isn't like Go or Chess. The gap from perfect information to imperfect information is quite a chasm, and from turn-based to real-time is even more vast. I play Age of Empires 2 semi-competitively, and I just can't imagine the research progress that would have to be made for a pro to lose to an APM-limited AI agent. So much of the game comes down to intuiting what your opponent is planning without being able to see what they're doing, and more importantly intuiting what your opponent isn't ready for. The biggest difference, though, is the "RT" in "RTS"-- real time. This isn't turn-based anymore, where at a given moment you have a single choice to make, a single piece to move as in Chess and Go, and can then wait for the singular and visible reaction your opponent makes before making your next choice. My understanding it that the moves a program like AlphaGo makes are not interconnected-- it picks each move individually as an ideal move for that board state. It could take over halfway through the game for someone else and would make the same move that it would have made at that point if it had been in control the whole time and arrived at that board state on its own. But that doesn't work in a real-time game, since you and your opponent are now moving simultaneously and the "board" is never static. Your moves must be cohesive and planned and flow continuously without time to ponder, each connected to the last. There is no "one" move for a given state. Another facet of real-time play is the idea of distraction. It's very important in RTS's to keep your opponent distracted, to disrupt their plans and their focus, by coming from unexpected directions at unexpected times, sometimes concurrently with other operations against them. This can't happen in Chess or Go, where the demands on your focus are far less urgent and two things can't happen at once in a literal sense. Can an AI agent learn to appreciate the power of distraction? Can it learn to intuit what will be most disruptive to a human, and what won't be disruptive at all? How can you teach a computer to learn to be annoying? I will say, of course, that nobody saw AlphaGo coming. And I hope it's the same with RTS's. That would be so exciting. I would love to see an AI blow us away with previously unthought-of strategies. That would be the coolest thing ever. So I hope it happens. But I'd be astonished. RTS is just such a whole new level of thinking for AIs. |
An example of a non-trigger is knowing that if I haven't seen a certain unit at time X, I know I'm safe to do Y. It is acting upon the information that something didn't happen.
To expand: I saw my opponent starting two gases at my 21 supply scout. When I scouted again at 47 supply, I saw no gas heavy units, so I can deduce the gas was used for better technology. This will allow me the opportunity to increase my worker count by Z before building army, or I could try and kill my opponent right there for his technological greed.