Beating the World’s Best at Super Smash Bros. with Deep Reinforcement Learning (opens in new tab)

( http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/b... )

https://chroniclesofelyria.com/

https://www.cs.mun.ca/~dchurchill/pdf/starcraft_survey.pdf

The competitions that involved humans showed humans destroyed them by spotting their patterns and beating those patterns. Also with bluffing or distractions such as having one unit do weird things around their base as the human player built up an army. The bots that beat humans will have to learn to spot bluffs and other weird patterns humans will do to screw with them. On top of all the stuff prior AI did with human-level talent. My money is on humans for DeepMind vs Starcraft although I'm happy to be proven wrong.

I believe they've handicapped themselves, actually, with their shortcuts: the performance of agents is crippled by the inability to see projectiles due to the choice to avoid learning from pixels (which I bet would actually be quite fast, as learning from pixels is not the bottleneck in ALE), and likewise the use of the other RAM features is the path of the Dark Side - allowing immediate quick learning through huge dimensionality reduction, seductively simple, yes, yet poison in the end as the agent is unable to learn all the other things it would've learned (such as projectiles). I suspect that this is why their current implementation is unable to learn to play multiple characters: because it can't see which character it is and what play style it should use.

So I would not be surprised at all to hear in a year or two that human-delay-equivalent agent using raw pixels could beat human champs routinely.

But this is what a top player (who regularly beats both of the players tested in the study) looks like playing against a hand-coded bot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qWHM8DNdr8

and this is what the humans eventually learned to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be8UDlVuAl8

Even if you add reaction time, a big part of Smash skill for humans comprises accurately manipulating the analog stick. The computer can just declare any angle it wants; you're not having a fair competition until you build a robot thumb that manipulates a joystick the way humans do, IMO. Otherwise a character like Pikachu can recover perfectly every time.

Most mid-level players already have a good grasp of prediction, which is arguably along the sames lines of being able to know with certainty what action your opponent is taking a few frames before he does it.

Coupling that with pretty obscene frame-lag for Smash, it's not really that much of an advantage.

As well that competitive isn't really that impressive considering how limited your actions are by banning items and more dynamic stages (see: restricting RNG). In this way, it's nothing more than a simple chess-bot. Now, if it could actually take in complex environments and multiple tools, that'd be pretty next level.