Alphabet’s DeepMind, the group that brought
us AlphaGo back in 2016, just released an
exciting update on their efforts to build
an AI to play StarCraft 2.
AlphaStar!
The live stream was full of great information
and I highly recommend you check it out if
you haven't already (Link down below the video).
I would like to focus in one cool point.
At 2:03:27 in the video the casters talk about
a strategy that the AI is using that goes
counter to conventional wisdom!
Over building workers!
I’ll put a link below to this point in the
video bellow (https://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs?t=7407)
Rotterdam points out that the community has
settled on 16 being the most efficient amount
of workers to mine with, sometimes 18 is okay
but not as efficient and anything over 24
is pointless.
AlphaStar is up to 25 or 26 workers, why would
it do this?
Is the AI bad and making a pour play or is
there something deeper going on?
As they are talking about this strange strategy
Mana (the human pro player) moves in with
a harassing unit and starts killing probs.
What perfect timing, this is the first reason
you might want more workers.
After fighting off the harassment AlphaStar
is back to full mining in no time.
The second use for the extra workers is that
when your second base is done you can move
them all over to the new base right away,
getting that base up to 100% much faster.
On the last match of the stream we actually
see the human player taking this strategy
on himself and over building workers!
I love that the AI shined light on this new
strategy and MANA has taken it to heart and
is trying it himself.
This isn’t the first time that an AI systems
has taught us a new strategy.
Consider Backgammon, an ancient board game
dating back thousands of years.
Quick crash course for those who don’t know
the game.
The basic goal is to move your tokens around
the board, past your opponent.
Groups of tokens are safe, but your opponent
can land on a solo token and capture it, sending
it back to the start.
TD-Gammon was an AI created in 1992 to play
Backgammon.
TD-Gammon revolutionized how the pros play
Backgammon after thousands of years!
Consider an opening roll of 4-1, conventional
wisdom was to use the 1 to move from point
6 to point 5, but TD-Gammon would instead
do the safe play of moving from 24-23.
Human players considered this new style carefully
and have now adopted the AI’s strategy.
I’m really excited to watch the next big
StarCraft 2 tournament and see if more pros
start overbuilding workers like AlphaStar!
I for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
I’m Mr. Page and I hope you enjoyed this
look into what we can learn from AI systems!
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See ya next time.
