[pmontra]

I try to make my point clearer.

If we want to measure strategy, I agree with you, and out of curiosity we might do it. But the goal is winning, so is strategy important as long as it wins? The AI can take every shortcut it finds IMHO. People do take shortcuts.

Cars and planes bring us across the world exactly because they don't walk like people and don't fly like birds. Wheels, fixed wings and turbofans are shortcuts and we're happy with them. We can build walking and wing flapping robots but they have different goals than what we need in our daily transportation activities.

[ajuc]

The problem with starcraft is - interface overhead is significant part of the game. AI doesn't have to cope with that - every click is perfect, and moving the mouse from one edge of the screen to the other takes no time.

If you want to make it fair - place an AI-steered robot in front of the screen, and make it record the screen with camera, and actually move the mouse and press the keys.

Then I can agree it's fair :)

But then of course AI would be incredibly bad.

Right now the advantage doesn't come from faster thinking, but from much higher bandwith and precision that AI has when controlling the game. It's anything but fair.

With chess it's not a problem, because interface overhead is negligible.

[pmontra]

Those are different engineering problems. I'm pretty sure that they could eventually build a pixel perfect camera and a fast pixel perfect robot mouse. They'll be at least as good as human eyes and hands, probably better. Done that, they'll keep winning.

It's surely interesting technology with positive impacts in a lot of areas but is it that the important part of the experiment? Humans need keyboards and mice to interface with computers, computers don't (lucky them.)

Sorry to insist on that analogy, but it looks to me as if my car should be able to fit my shoes and walk before I admit that it goes to another city quicker than me walking.

[ajuc]

No, these are not "just" engineering problems.

When you're trying to individually blink 30 stalkers at the perfect time they have almost 1 hp - latency is everything.

Camera has latency. Depending on various factors it takes even milliseconds of exposure for camera to gather enough light that it registers as a clear image frame. Human eye works on a different basis, but also isn't instant. You cannot cut that in software, human player cannot train to lower this. But AI doesn't need to do it - it has image provided as a memory buffer.

Image recognition has latency (both in the brain and in computer). Even as simple stuff as recognizing where the computer screen is as opposed to the background. It takes time. AI doesn't need to do it.

Muscles (engines in robot hands) have latency.

Mouses and hands have inertia and can't be moved instantly - have to be accelerated and stopped and even if you have optimal algorithm to be 100% accurate - it takes time.

It's not only hard to implement, it's also physically IMPOSSIBLE to do without introducing significant delays.

AI that is controlling the ui directly doesn't have to deal with most of these tasks, so it has a huge advantage in a game like starcraft. It's not that AI is so much better, it's that AI is high-frequency trading and human player is sending requests to buy/sell by telefax. By the time your request is processed the other guy had opportunity to do 10 different things.

If you want to focus on the part of the job that is doable now - sure, go ahead. But then don't abuse the unfair advantages you have and announce you "won". It's very low threshold to win in starcraft when your opponent has effectively 100 times the lag you do.

I'm sure someday we will have AI that can beat human player in starcraft without abusing this advantage, And I'm pretty sure the fastest way to this isn't to put a real robot in front of a screen, but it's to limit the intraface bandwidth of the AI to be on the similar level as that of human players.

> Sorry to insist on that analogy, but it looks to me as if my car should be able to fit my shoes and walk before I admit that it goes to another city quicker than me walking.

Let's remove the roads that we made specifically for cars and speak about this again :) Will your car move you through an untamed wilderness quicker than your legs? Possibly. Or not at all.

If I walk into a bullet train, slowly walk inside it, and walk out of it at the end of the route I will be even faster than the fastest car. Is it fair to say I'm faster than a car? After all it's not my fault the car doesn't fit inside that bullet train :)

We need to compare apples to apples, and comparing AI that doesn't need to deal with half the sources of latency with a human player that does, in a game where latency is very important - just isn't fair.

[otikik]

If you don't put any limits on the AI, it's not Starcraft any more.

You could make an AI which tries to hack the human computer to force a leave. That would also constitute a "win". Or one which hacks its own computer and displays "You win" immediately. Or one which tries to kill the human player, if we want to be really dramatic about it.