User blog:OmaMorkie/Winter is Coming - Call to Unite the Starcraft Players

Starcrafters we are under attack! The robots are coming, and they will be awesome at Starcraft!

For those of you who haven't heard of it yet: The robots just conquered Go. So far, the game and it's gosu human players were considered the toughest nut for artificial intelligence to crack. And humans indeed are kind of good at it - They have a bad ass 4'000-year old East Asian tradition, with all their different schools and styles and hundreds of years of paper record of ancient master Games.

And still the Robot won earlier this years, and it continues to do so.

They are coming for us next. Goolge has set aim to crack Starcraft II. Blizzard is on their side already, there is no stopping them now.

The AI will be playing fair, it only sees what's on the screen, maybe even have an APM limit. But it is coming, and it will be tough. We better burrow those widdow mines behind the ultralisk line and cloak them from our mothership.

But there is hope. There is a way for our race to fight back, while holding back the attack waves. The best part: It actually does read like straight from the Starcraft missions. The chess scene has already done it years ago, and the go-scene is currently starting with it.

We will become hybrids. Or in our terms, we will play in Archon Mode with that AI. In chess, it became clear quickly that a Human-AI Archon (or „Centaur“ as they call it) will beat both two humans and two AIs for the very best players, and they have their own league now, pushing both human and AI understanding of chess to new limits. That build-order is also known as “Race with the Machines” and applies to all Human-AI strategic interaction in life, not just strategy games.

But we still have some time. Focus on defense. We need to put some effort into this as like, right now, and I hope you are with me. What can we do to be ready for them? Well, I did go through a scientific education in my day life, so let me set out a draft build-order. That's really what this video series is meant to develop - a meta-build order, a discussion on how to systematically improve the highest level of play.

Let me give you some examples of the thinking:

My first hypotheses for the human-AI Achron mode meta is that all teams will end up playing random.

A first primitive model of the Game was enough to develop that theoretical prediction, with only two assumptions: The 1st Axiom is Perfect Play – So I'm saying random has an advantage, once you play all races perfect, because you have less pressure to scout. Elazers 4-Ravenger rush against random without Probe-Scout anyone? The only reason for not choosing random would be imbalance - Enter the 2nd Axiom - Perfect Balance. Every thing else being equal, and assuming god-like Blizzard perfectly nerving the Adept when ever it gets too much of those shady Protos wins, Random will rule the day. The experimental test for Oma's Random Hypothesis will take a long time though. But theory is only half the fun without experiment, so I also made one for you. Attached the replays.

They've been made to falsify a hypothesis repeatedly heard from commentators:

Roaches become less efficient against Marines because Marines benefit more from upgrades.



That statement seems mathematically wrong to me. Both units get +1 for both Damage and Armor (unlike e.g. Banelings, who get more than 1 damage). Therefore the damage upgrades are 100% neutralized by the Armor upgrades of the other unit and vice versa. 0-0 Marine vs. 0-0 Roaches should thus engage exactly the same as 3-3 Marines vs. 3-3 Roaches. Either the initial statement is flat wrong and late-game Roach is actually just as viable against Marines as early game, or it is right that Roaches suck against Marines in the later game, but for a different reasons, like Medivacs, Stim, Combat Shield or more complex strategic reasons. Both would be interesting findings and some further research will be required to find that out.

The experimental setup is using a ceteris-paribus comparison is the unit creator. I had 5 Roaches fight against 8 Marines, using a simple A-Move on the Roaches and no clicks on the Marines. I noted the surviving units and hit points, and repeated the experiment, while gradually adding upgrades to both unit types.

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<p lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom:0cm;line-height:100%">Links to the replays of the experiment to follow shortly. In the mean time, there is no harm in repeating at home.

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<p lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom:0cm;line-height:100%">P.S. had to remove the links for the spam filter. You can google the centaur chess, go, and AI Starcraft story, as well as the "Race Against the Machines" concept yourself.