Article: StarCraft is Driving AI Research

01-18-2008, 02:59 AM	#1
thenonhacker	StarCraft Driving AI Research http://www.aus-1.com/aus-1-news/star...-20070719.html "This article explores the impact of Real-Time Strategy(RTS) games, such as StarCraft and Military simulations, on Artificial Intelligence(AI) research."

01-18-2008, 03:00 AM

thenonhacker

Another quote:

"[Computer] opponents do not: smartly adapt to adversaries, learn from their own mistakes, look-ahead in abstracted search spaces, reason about spatial and temporal object relations, nor do they collaborate and communicate well. Human experts on the other hand, excel in all those areas."

"Although research on artificial intelligence has far to go, it is feasible that one day soon there will AI systems that will be able to outperform human opponents."

01-18-2008, 03:03 AM	#3
thenonhacker	Here are the studies the article is talking about: RTS Games as Test-Bed for Real-Time AI Research http://jobfunctions.bnet.com/whitepa...x?docid=127381 Playing Smart Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games http://jobfunctions.bnet.com/whitepa...7&promo=100511

01-18-2008, 11:22 AM	#4
Strategy Master	Nice find nonhacker. Reminds me of many things brought up in my artificial intelligence lecture :)

01-18-2008, 11:55 AM

thenonhacker

Thanks!

Check out the ORTS Project "Open Real Time Strategy":

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/orts/

Quote:

ORTS is a programming environment for studying real-time AI problems such as pathfinding, dealing with imperfect information, scheduling, and planning in the domain of RTS games. These games are fast-paced and very popular. Furthermore, the current state of RTS game AI is bleak which is mainly caused by the lack of planning and learning - areas in which humans are currently much better than machines. Therefore, RTS games make an ideal test-bed for real-time AI research. Unfortunately, commercial RTS games are closed software which prevents researchers from connecting remote AI modules to them. Furthermore, commercial RTS games are based on peer-to-peer technology - which in a nutshell runs the entire simulation on all player machines and just hides part of the game state from the players. By tampering with the client software it is possible to reveal the entire game state and thereby gain an unfair advantage. We feel that this is unacceptable for playing games on the internet. We therefore started the ORTS project to create a free software system that lets people and machines play fair RTS games. The communication protocol is public and all source code and artwork is freely available. Users can connect whatever client software they like. This is made possible by a server/client architecture in which only the currently visible parts of the game state are sent to the players. This openness leads to new and interesting possibilities ranging from on-line tournaments of autonomous AI players to gauge their playing strength to hybrid systems in which human players use sophisticated GUIs which allow them to delegate tasks to AI helper modules of increasing performance.

02-01-2008, 01:03 PM	#6
Zalamander	Think we had some plan long ago in trying to make AMAI learn from mistakes in some manner but it only works when its played in singleplayer mode else it cant save data to files and read later. :<

02-03-2008, 02:18 AM

calmb4storm

Thanks for the articles!

Quote:

Originally Posted by thenonhacker

Here are the studies the article is talking about:
Playing Smart Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games
http://jobfunctions.bnet.com/whitepa...7&promo=100511

Woops 404. Here's the new link (PDF 202kb):

zfxcon03: playing smart artificial intelligence in computer games