User blog:OmaMorkie/Winter is coming - A call to unite the Humans among 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. (1)

The Robots are winning!

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. (2)

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. (2)

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 (3), 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. Gary Kasparow invented the play style. 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 (4).

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. I will start posting experiments on how to theoretically optimze here. My tools will be the unit tester, slow game modes and asking stronger players to train wired techniques to see if they are any good if well executed. More to follow soon.

by Oma Morkie

(1) http://www.nature.com/news/google-ai-algorithm-masters-ancient-game-of-go-1.19234 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol - There is plenty of deeper analysis out there (2) https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-and-blizzard-release-starcraft-ii-ai-research-environment/ (3) start at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess (4) https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2013/04/13/racing-with-the-machines/#643d08052997 which refers to https://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-Machine-Accelerating-Productivity-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI