It is extremely difficult to train a superhuman Artificial Intelligence (AI) for games of similar size to StarCraft II. AlphaStar is the first AI that beat human professionals in the full game of StarCraft II, using a league training framework that is inspired by a game-theoretic approach. In this paper, we improve AlphaStar's league training in two significant aspects. We train goal-conditioned exploiters, whose abilities of spotting weaknesses in the main agent and the entire league are greatly improved compared to the unconditioned exploiters in AlphaStar. In addition, we endow the agents in the league with the new ability of opponent modeling, which makes the agent more responsive to the opponent's real-time strategy. Based on these improvements, we train a better and superhuman AI with orders of magnitude less resources than AlphaStar (see Table 1 for a full comparison). Considering the iconic role of StarCraft II in game AI research, we believe our method and results on StarCraft II provide valuable design principles on how one would utilize the general league training framework for obtaining a least-exploitable strategy in various, large-scale, real-world games.

In this paper, we improve AlphaStar's league training

It is extremely difficult to train a superhuman Artificial Intelligence (AI) for games of similar size to StarCraft II. AlphaStar is the first AI that beat human professionals in the full game of StarCraft II, using a league training framework that is inspired by a game-theoretic approach. In this paper, we improve AlphaStar's league training in two significant aspects. We train goal-conditioned exploiters, whose abilities of spotting weaknesses in the main agent and the entire league are greatly improved compared to the unconditioned exploiters in AlphaStar. In addition, we endow the agents in the league with the new ability of opponent modeling, which makes the agent more responsive to the opponent's real-time strategy.

Taking on a historical lens, this paper traces the development of cybernetics and systems thinking back to the 1950s, when a group of interdisciplinary scholars converged to create a new theoretical model based on machines and systems for understanding matters of meaning, information, consciousness, and life. By presenting a genealogy of research in the landscape architecture discipline, the paper argues that landscape architects have been an important part of the development of cybernetics by materializing systems based on cybernetic principles in the environment through ecologically based landscape design. The landscape discipline has developed a design framework that provides transformative insights into understanding machine intelligence. The paper calls for a new paradigm of environmental engagement to understand matters of design and machine intelligence.

StarCraft II (SC2) poses a grand challenge for reinforcement learning (RL), of which the main difficulties include huge state space, varying action space, and a long time horizon. In this work, we investigate a set of RL techniques for the full-length game of StarCraft II. We investigate a hierarchical RL approach, where the hierarchy involves two. One is the extracted macro-actions from experts’ demonstration trajectories to reduce the action space in an order of magnitude. The other is a hierarchical architecture of neural networks, which is modular and facilitates scale. We investigate a curriculum transfer training procedure that trains the agent from the simplest level to the hardest level. We train the agent on a single machine with 4 GPUs and 48 CPU threads. On a 64x64 map and using restrictive units, we achieve a win rate of 99% against the difficulty level-1 built-in AI. Through the curriculum transfer learning algorithm and a mixture of combat models, we achieve a 93% win rate against the most difficult non-cheating level built-in AI (level-7). In this extended version of the paper, we improve our architecture to train the agent against the most difficult cheating level AIs (level-8, level-9, and level-10). We also test our method on different maps to evaluate the extensibility of our approach. By a final 3-layer hierarchical architecture and applying significant tricks to train SC2 agents, we increase the win rate against the level-8, level-9, and level-10 to 96%, 97%, and 94%, respectively. Our codes and models are all open-sourced now at https://github.com/liuruoze/HierNet-SC2. To provide a baseline referring the AlphaStar for our work as well as the research and open-source community, we reproduce a scaled-down version of it, mini-AlphaStar (mAS). The latest version of mAS is 1.07, which can be trained using supervised learning and reinforcement learning on the raw action space which has 564 actions. It is designed to run training on a single common machine, by making the hyper-parameters adjustable and some settings simplified. We then can compare our work with mAS using the same computing resources and training time. By experiment results, we show that our method is more effective when using limited resources. The inference and training codes of mini-AlphaStar are all open-sourced at https://github.com/liuruoze/mini-AlphaStar. We hope our study could shed some light on the future research of efficient reinforcement learning on SC2 and other large-scale games.

StarCraft II (SC2) poses a grand challenge for reinforcement learning (RL), of which the main difficulties include huge state space, varying action space, and a long time horizon. In this work, we investigate a set of RL techniques for the full-length game of StarCraft II. We investigate a hierarchical RL approach involving extracted macro-actions and a hierarchical architecture of neural networks. We investigate a curriculum transfer training procedure and train the agent on a single machine with 4 GPUs and 48 CPU threads. On a 64x64 map and using restrictive units, we achieve a win rate of 99% against the level-1 built-in AI. Through the curriculum transfer learning algorithm and a mixture of combat models, we achieve a 93% win rate against the most difficult non-cheating level built-in AI (level-7). In this extended version of the paper, we improve our architecture to train the agent against the cheating level AIs and achieve the win rate against the level-8, level-9, and level-10 AIs as 96%, 97%, and 94%, respectively. Our codes are at https://github.com/liuruoze/HierNet-SC2. To provide a baseline referring the AlphaStar for our work as well as the research and open-source community, we reproduce a scaled-down version of it, mini-AlphaStar (mAS). The latest version of mAS is 1.07, which can be trained on the raw action space which has 564 actions. It is designed to run training on a single common machine, by making the hyper-parameters adjustable. We then compare our work with mAS using the same resources and show that our method is more effective. The codes of mini-AlphaStar are at https://github.com/liuruoze/mini-AlphaStar. We hope our study could shed some light on the future research of efficient reinforcement learning on SC2 and other large-scale games.

Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. The development of AI is speeding up on a daily basis. Only recently, Google's DeepMind created the AI AlphaStar that secured a decisive victory against two grandmaster players of the game of StarCraft II. In a series of test matches they played, the algorithm won 5-0. This victory is a decisive moment for artificial intelligence, as the game of StarCraft II is fundamentally more difficult than the other games where Deepmind's algorithm already claimed victory.

DeepMind, the AI lab backed by Google parent company Alphabet, has long invested in game-playing AI systems. It's the lab's philosophy that games, while lacking an obvious commercial application, are uniquely relevant challenges of cognitive and reasoning capabilities. This makes them useful benchmarks of AI progress. In recent decades, games have given rise to the kind of self-learning AI that powers computer vision, self-driving cars, and natural language processing. In a continuation of its work, DeepMind has created a system called Player of Games, which the company first revealed in a research paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org this week.

With breakthrough of AlphaGo, AI in human-computer game has become a very hot topic attracting researchers all around the world, which usually serves as an effective standard for testing artificial intelligence. Various game AI systems (AIs) have been developed such as Libratus, OpenAI Five and AlphaStar, beating professional human players. In this paper, we survey recent successful game AIs, covering board game AIs, card game AIs, first-person shooting game AIs and real time strategy game AIs. Through this survey, we 1) compare the main difficulties among different kinds of games for the intelligent decision making field ; 2) illustrate the mainstream frameworks and techniques for developing professional level AIs; 3) raise the challenges or drawbacks in the current AIs for intelligent decision making; and 4) try to propose future trends in the games and intelligent decision making techniques. Finally, we hope this brief review can provide an introduction for beginners, inspire insights for researchers in the filed of AI in games.