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Comment by andrewclunn | Hacker News Reader

The AI had better be able to interact using a mouse and keyboard. Any time I see the "AI wins!" headline, for anything real time, it was invariably given a superior interface. Watson getting a text file sent to it instead of having to read the screen or listen to Alex read the answer for example. If the machine isn't watching a monitor and forced to use the same input methods as the players, then sure it will "win," but it will be a cheat, not a triumph of AI.

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You are missing the point of man vs machine competitions. It's unbalanced on purpose. The aim is to see if an AI with all its unique advantages can best a human with their unique advantages. It is not to create a physical robot that has to mimic the disadvantages of a human.

That's not cheating, it's a agreed upon rules. Making an AI that can beat a human is already very hard. Next you'll add other arbitrary requirements, like limiting the wattage to what the human brain uses...

I'm not missing the point. If you have to modify the game itself to allow the AI to compete, then it's cheating. It would be like self driving cars that required specialised roads.

Let the AI use USB for keyboard and mouse, and hdmi to see; then you don't have to modify the game.

What you're suggesting is that an AI can't really drive unless it's operating the car the same way a human does, i.e. with a steering wheel and pedals rather than having a direct digital interface into the car.

No. I even said what the analogy would be for self driving cars. I'm calling out the BS of the marketing scams for investment dollars that are these contests. Point out that and a bunch of people get butt hurt because they need that investment money.

Bullshit, a human only has 2 eyes, but a self driving car can see in all directions at once. You are just making up arbitrary rules.

I think you're missing the point of man vs machine competitions when we're talking about testing intelligence.

Machines are obviously better at everything requiring fast-twitch reflexes and massive data analysis. There's nothing interesting in a competition there.

In Starcraft, the fear is that machine-level micro may make it completely pointless. A human could play strategically better and still lose because the physics of moving a mouse are different than the physics of a transistor.

Guess what, StarCraft AI competitions aren't new, so your fear is misplaced.

I'm just explaining the concern that you were dismissing, whether it's valid in this instance or not.

Why do you think that controlling a mouse and keyboard would be hard? Industrial robots can do stuff like that with sub-millimeter precision and super-speed.

Controlling the motors of a drone or the moving surfaces of a fly-by-wire plane is much more complex than moving a mouse or hitting some keys.

Even with perfect mouse control, the AI would still be limited by the viewport offered, which is a tiny sliver of the map, and the refresh rate of the monitor, which would be at most 120 FPS I'd think. Information gathering would have to be balanced against issuing commands, as both take from a shared resource pool of viewport time.

Forcing an AI to play with a mouse, keyboard, and monitor is a huge handicap compared to giving it a God's-eye view API.

It would literally need just one frame to see and store all available information in said frame. This means that in just a few frames, it could jump around the entire map and get a complete overview of what's available. It could easily be abstracted away, meaning the AI has access to a complete view of the map from its point of view, provided by a relatively simple conventional piece of software which just now and then jumps across the entire map and processes the images. It's thus not really an interesting problem to solve in this context, just a minor annoyance.

He didn't say it would be hard, just more fair.

Taken to the limit, an AI with an API to the game can take micro-control of every character. His high-level strategy might not even matter, if every character can fight optimally. At the very least, an AI would have an advantage when starting multiple battles, since he doesn't have the "switching" overhead of panning around the screen, clicking on items to issue orders, etc. But that "god mode" option is not available to a human. (Even if we slowed down the game, the human would get likely get bored before playing optimally.)

But if the AI were limited in the same way a human was, the AI couldn't monitor an infinite number of battles at the same time, couldn't issue control instructions infinitely fast, etc.

Maybe the AI can click around "fast enough" that it wouldn't matter (we don't know). But at least it would be a fair fight.

You bring up a good related point, although I don't care as much about the mouse and keyboard. My issue is with the UI.

This is different from checkers or chess or go. The Starcraft UI is part of the balance of the game itself, so if you change it you are changing the game. People do this all the time to help humans beat other humans, and we call it cheating. Why is it magically not cheating if we do it for AI?

If they do have to change the UI (e.g. hook a datastream directly into the AI), the opponent should be able to install any mods they want. Otherwise the AI is playing one game while the human is playing another.

Exactly. I think, in contrast to chess or go, Starcraft is not only a "mind game", but also requires physical agility and precision for command outputs. Those Starcraft top players all have had wrist injuries and so forth [1].

If the AIs were to become strong enough to compete against Starcraft players, they would have the unfair advantage of being able to give a lot more actions per second.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/16mkmg/injuries_...

You could limit the APM the AI can use I think :/ Give it the same number of APM as the mean of the top 100 players. Something of the sort...

What if the pace of play were slowed down 5x, so it became about strategy and not execution?

The particulars of the interface are really not the point of these exercises

It should be pretty easy to simulate the physical constraints that players are under in terms of actions per minute, etc.

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