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Comment by dontreact | Hacker News Reader

What is deepmind going to do once they solve all video games? It seems like they are leveraging the massive economic demand for entertaining simulations of the world. But once they hit the limit of that they will have to make their own simulations.

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Deepmind can always transfer learning to the robotics industry, if they haven't already. There's bound to be a space they can fill with the progress they've made in these video game reinforcement learning tasks. Maybe aiding in medical discoveries?

The sim to real gap is very large and it honestly seems to me like maybe most of the work is not in the RL part of it but rather instrumenting the robot properly, setting up the right simulation, figuring out how to scale up the real world learning. Haven't seen much robotics stuff come out of Deepmind yet, maybe for these reasons.

You need algorithms that can learn complex tasks and also reason under uncertainty. Not just uncertainty of sensor inputs but also uncertainty of state. The goal of all of these video games is to develop the algorithms over a wide range of difficulty. So algorithms that have memory, learn / plan and are reasonably robust etc...

AI in an RTS, like Deepmind in Starcraft, can simply issue more commands and react faster than a human - since game information can be gleaned directly from the frame buffer, and instructions issued without going through the analogue of a mouse and keyboard.

I want to nitpick a bit: AFAIK DeepMind didn't use the frame buffer in StarCraft. In the widely reported matches DeepMind didn't even have to move the camera. This was apparent in one of the matches against Man's, where DeepMind blink microd its Stalkers over what would be multiple screens for a human player (so you would have to move the camera to do the same, which is impossible at that speed). They did play one match, where DeepMind was basically controlling the camera too (separately trained) and Mana beat it.

On another note, even though it was said that DeepMind was APM limited in StarCraft, it did spike to 1500 at some points, which is not doable for a human. So, I'd say that DeepMind hasn't quite got there yet in beating SC2 pros. They could definitely make very interesting single player opponents though. I hope that in the future I can play a strategy game alone and have some interesting AI opponents to play against.

Can't you jump the camera by clicking on the minimap to anywhere else on the map? Or are you saying the view did not move at all? Just stayed on their base the entire time or something?

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