{"id":84804,"date":"2018-11-16T20:42:26","date_gmt":"2018-11-17T04:42:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/an-old-fashioned-ai-has-won-a-starcraft-shootout"},"modified":"2018-11-16T20:42:26","modified_gmt":"2018-11-17T04:42:26","slug":"an-old-fashioned-ai-has-won-a-starcraft-shootout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/an-old-fashioned-ai-has-won-a-starcraft-shootout","title":{"rendered":"An old-fashioned AI has won a Starcraft shootout"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/an-old-fashioned-ai-has-won-a-starcraft-shootout.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>En Taro AI<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.mun.ca\/~dchurchill\/starcraftaicomp\/2018\/\">latest results<\/a> in a long-running contest of video-game-playing AIs reveal how hard it is for machines to master swarming insectoid Zergs or blitzing Protos. They also show that even old-school approaches can still sometimes win out.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.mun.ca\/~dchurchill\/starcraftaicomp\/history.shtml\">AIIDE Starcraft Contest<\/a> has been running at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, since 2010. Participating teams submit bots that play an original version of Starcraft, a sprawling sci-fi-themed game, in a series of one-on-one showdowns.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Starcraftiness: <\/strong>Video games are generally useful in AI because they offers a constrained environment and a good way to quantify progress. The popular online strategy game Starcraft has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/the-download\/612188\/tencents-ai-programs-defeat-starcrafts-own-ai\/https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/s\/608576\/what-ai-needs-to-learn-to-master-alien-warfare\/\">emerged as an important benchmark for AI<\/a> both because it is extremely complicated and because it\u2019s a game where it\u2019s hard to measure progress. There are a vast number of possible states and a huge number of potential moves at every moment. And it can be hard to tell if a strategy is a good one until much later on in a battle.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/the-download\/612438\/an-old-fashioned-ai-has-won-a-starcraft-shootout\/\">https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/the-download\/612438\/an-old-...-shootout\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>En Taro AI The latest results in a long-running contest of video-game-playing AIs reveal how hard it is for machines to master swarming insectoid Zergs or blitzing Protos. They also show that even old-school approaches can still sometimes win out. The AIIDE Starcraft Contest has been running at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, since 2010. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":466,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/466"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84804\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}