dgant

Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, both by Lucas Pope.

This dilemma is addressable in a rational framework. Utilitarianism suggests you can attempt to quantify the harm done by your purchase, and decide how to discount that harm against your own self interest. You're also able to estimate whether the costs involved are probably so marginal that it's outweighed by the cost of thinking about the dilemma such that it would be best to commit to either decision rather than continue deliberating.

"No clinically severe COVID-19 (1) was observed, and no patient was hospitalized"

In other words, this case study is a relatively ordinary result in line with what we know: that the major COVID-19 vaccines greatly reduce the chance of severe illness but leave nontrivial chance of infection and transmission.

A great read on dithering: Lucas Pope's development blogs while working on Return of the Obra Dinn.

It's an incredible dive into how he created the game's remarkable and unique look, featuring a wonderful and unexpected mathematical contribution from a forum member. If you're not familiar with the game peek at a trailer to see what an achievement it was.

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...

Neat!

My StarCraft-playing bot uses a similar approach for fast pathfinding. The similarity is that we're both trying to use a better heuristic than straight-line distance. In the case of my bot, it's done by breaking the map into roughly-convex regions, then precalculating the distance from the center of those regions to every other tile by flood-filling. That lets units outside the region use (distance to boundary of goal region + straight-line distance from boundary to goal tile) as a pretty good heuristic.

If it were just a matter of hand speed, bots using uncapped speed (tens of thousands of actions per minute) would be beating humans years ago. But quality matters way more than quantity. It's a hard problem.

The Brood War AI development community is very welcoming and supportive.

You can see bots in action at https://twitch.tv/sscait

Most discussion happen on Discord at https://discord.gg/QU457H

The main discussion forum is Discord: https://discord.gg/HpnNmsG

Announcements are usually on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bwapi

Another popular StarCraft-related blog is: http://satirist.org/ai/starcraft/blog/

There's a 24/7 stream of AI games at: https://twitch.tv/sscait (perfect background noise for coding)

And I have to mention the research done by my team on StarCraft at: https://torchcraft.github.io/TorchCraftAI/

NFL rules require that an NFL team have a majority owner (with Green Bay grandfathered as an exception).

It will likely have to be sold.

It's telling that the risk premium is 20%.

What's a good source for keeping up with the industry?

There's a substantial community around Hearthstone AI: https://hearthsim.info/

Humans are all susceptible to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect -- it predates civilization.

Enjoyed the article. But I'm a bit confused by the Venn diagram; neither StarCraft nor DOTA are deterministic or fully observable. And they are discrete only at such extreme resolutions that they may as well be continuous.

StarCraft is a strategy game but it's also an action sport. The "how" of micro actions is largely the sport itself, both from a decision-making and execution standpoint. Imagine a footballer having a "kick goal" or a "kick ball past goalie" button -- it'd largely defeat the purpose.

I believe the command spamming /u/tomlock is referring to is the phenomenon where players issue as many or more commands when doing nothing as when an intense sequence is happening. This is primarily done to keep rhythm.

There are a few ways to run Brood War headlessly. And if not headlessly, sped up as fast as your CPU can process frames (and Brood War is very fast -- it ran on Pentium 90s!). TorchCraft is compatible with any Brood War client that supports BWAPI, including the headless ones.

BWAPI supports optional user interaction: https://bwapi.github.io/class_b_w_a_p_i_1_1_game.html#a4db25... and https://bwapi.github.io/class_b_w_a_p_i_1_1_game.html#a4db25... -- someone actually just used BWAPI to make an automated real-time coach: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/533143-coach-ai-ha...

That's not an investment. There is no value being generated and nothing is growing. It's speculation.

Brood War competitions have been going on for seven years, with individual bots getting years of development. If beating professionals was easy it'd have been done by now.

It turns out that being really good at narrow micromanagement situations doesn't add up to winning complete games. StarCraft is messy and difficult.

Sure. I had a winning record vs. Iron in the tournament. Both are very strong but within grasp. The hard part is that any success is a bit fleeting; both have very capable and driven authors who will shore up weaknesses very quickly!

The best AIs right now would beat above average folks from the public. But as you start approaching anyone who resembles a professional, bots rapidly turn into practice dummies.

The biggest problems I'm personally facing at the moment are midgame macro with imperfect information -- how many Gateways do I need to be producing from before I can safely take a third base or transition to endgame tech? -- and engaging Terran mech armies. It's very hard to know when or how to engage a Terran mech army, and you usually only get one chance to get it right. Dithering results in bleeding units you can't afford to lose.

The biggest problem in general is that rules-based approaches are asymptoticly approaching the limit of their capabilities. Either of the problems I've described are big undertakings but only scratch the surface of what PurpleWave needs to advance. Machine learning is the way forward. But so far real time strategy games have proved remarkably impenetrable.

Consider that professional players often place their initial buildings to provide Scarab-proof escape routes for their workers against Reaver drops that arrive ten minutes later. Such placements are only effective if you know to react to Reaver drops by funneling your workers through them to glitch the Scarabs. How are you going to let your bot learn that on its own? There's a lot of work to do.

Hi! Author of PurpleWave here. A bit late to the party but happy to answer questions.

Hi Strilanc. Author of PurpleWave here.

That particular scene at the sunken colonies was equally frustrating to watch. I fixed the most likely cause of that behavior shortly after the tournament deadline.

But for sure, you're correct. There's a lot left to do on all fronts. There's noticeable progress every year -- none of last year's entries finished much over 50% -- and the growing research community should help accelerate that even more.

How to efficiently achieve build goals is itself a mostly solved problem. See BOSS by Dave Churchill.

The catch is that "can I build this without dying in the process" is an almost completely unsolved problem. Even "can my opponent just kill me now" is currently only solved by fairly crude approximation. Without being able to evaluate that statically we're nowhere near evaluating it over the course of a build order, accounting for incomplete information and multiple possible responses.

In general, Starcraft is tricky because very small differences in unrelated concerns can cause wild swings in expected outcome. Compare a Terran wall-in that blocks zealots vs. one with a zealot-sized gap. A few pixels of space -- a pathfinding concern -- radically impacts build order concerns.

Come check out the current state-of-the-art (and lots of earlier stage work as well) at http://twitch.tv/sscait

This was a big cause of the death of CampusNetwork, which in 2004-5 was a credible competitor to Facebook. Because it encouraged for campus-wide conversation -- rather than just conversation with your immediate contacts -- it gravitated towards politically extreme conversation that dissuaded mainstream participation. Which is a shame, because it did act as a good way to meet new people, which isn't Facebook's forte.

They sure do have a long way to go. That's what makes it exciting! Real time strategy games are the last frontier for human superiority in competitive games, and it looks to be a generational gap like Chess or Go.

The absence of such techniques is usually due to prioritization rather than ignorance. Most of the time the challenge is just the sheer complexity of basic decisionmaking. The author of this article did a frame-by-frame breakdown of unit attack animation timings, but "should I fight or run" is by itself still an interesting and important question.

The #1 bot as I write this, Iron Bot, has Vulture micro that is in many ways better than any pro, by using frame-perfect patrol kiting.

Hi all. I'm an author of a currently competing Starcraft AI and am pretty familiar with the scene and the techniques used. Happy to answer any questions.

This article is from 2015. Some recent updates: Facebook and Alibaba recently published papers on using pure learning techniques for controlling units, showing great progress while having a ways to go before catching up to traditional techniques. Google DeepMind is collaborating with Blizzard to make these competitions possible for Starcraft 2. And Martin Rooijackers, author of 2016 SSCAIT champion LetaBot, wrote an update on more recent developments: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/521711-berkeley-overmind-20-...

On Windows, I can see the logo on one of my screens, but not the other.

Might be referring to NT