[ktwo]

IMO there should also be a precision limit. The timing of actions should include human-typical jitter and the wrong action should sometimes be activated to simulate misclicks/fat-finger keypresses — e.g., messing up a control group by assinging a unit to the wrong number key. The bot must also not be able to act faster than human reaction times (~250ms), this could be enforced by adding a fixed delay to the observations.

I wouldn't be surprised if human Starcraft II play isn't so much limited by decision-making as by the translation of decisions into mechanical actions, which in turn dilutes the attention devoted to actual decision making.

[mulmen]

Since existing bots are far from being competitive with human players why further handicap them in ways that deal with an entirely different domain?

[marcell]

Yea, agreed. Specifically they should add a loss function that compares the AI's action stream against a pro human action stream, and attempt minimize that loss.

[SilasX]

Right -- likewise it would be nice to have it mimic human cognition limits, like time lag for loading a new info source into memory.

[branja]

ideally they'd train it on real keypresses rather than actions

[mulmen]

Why would that be ideal? Wouldn't that just make ML at the strategy layer harder without doing anything to make the discoveries more valuable?

[branja]

to emulate human handicaps at the interface layer. I didn't say it would be free

[mulmen]

But why is that desirable? Why would we want to emulate the human physical handicaps in our quest to advance AI at a strategy level?

[branja]

For the same reason the APM are limited: to ensure that what we are doing is really focusing on advancing strategy rather than brute mechanical skill. If I played against an AI using nothing but the rendered frames and sound of a game as input, I might not even make the stipulation on reflexes. I'd be humbled if I lost.

As it stands now, most of the games I like have bad AI. Sure, it can be fun to play a hack and slash against lots of little, dumb minions, but FPS, RTS AI these days still don't cut it as savvy opponents. Often they have inhuman perception, direct knowledge of game state, or higher starting resources, but they make abysmal decisions.

Yes, I realize these are unlikely, expensive goals and incremental progress is how things are done. I just want to know if it's possible or desirable to emulate actual human reaction time.

Do you disagree this would in principle help separate strategy from godlike reflexes?

[mulmen]

This is not the same AI you normally face in a game. Most (all?) of those AI opponents use rules written by the game developers to make decisions and some of them simply cheat to be competitive (cough Mario Kart 64 cough).

This blog is about creating AIs that interact with the game the same way humans do, the computer plays by the same rules and has no special access to the game state beyond what the player would have. With these constraints there are no existing bots for StarCraft or StarCraft 2 that can even beat the built-in rule-based AI. They aren't even close to beating professional players.

If the strategy abilities are so weak today that we can't even beat the tutorial AI then why introduce further arbitrary handicaps on the bots? How do those handicaps advance the state of the strategy layer? The AI has many potential advantages over the human player beyond just reaction time. Should we also limit the amount of data the bot considers to emulate the amount of inputs a human player can process? What about emulating human memory, can a human really learn from 60,000+ games? What about 1.5 million?

I do not think it is desirable to emulate human limitations in AI unless you are trying to create an artificial human. I think the advantage of creating an AI is to do something people can't already do so why should we impose our physical constraints on them?

I do not think it is important to separate reflex from strategy. Since every player has a different APM ability some strategies are more valid than others for each individual. If I do not have the reflexes of a professional player there are strategies I cannot employ. As long as StarCraft is not imposing APM limits on human players to maintain competitiveness the bots should also not have a limit.