EPT
Computers and Thinking
I was recently reading a thread about the difficulty level of Sc2 AIs. Basically, after a while they stop getting smarter and just get bonus resources and stuff, because of how difficulty it is to make a smart AI. One commenter wrote:
On August 25 2014 09:51 FaceSlaP wrote:
I guess this goes to show that SCII is even more complicated and requires a higher IQ to master than chess where computers have recently completely dominated humans.
I guess this goes to show that SCII is even more complicated and requires a higher IQ to master than chess where computers have recently completely dominated humans.
It might be worth noting that in chess there are significantly fewer parameters involved in being "ahead". You can represent someone's pieces+position advantage in chess using a number, then have your chess computer look at a bunch of possible moves and pick the one that gives the best number. In Starcraft, there's a lot more going on in terms of ways you can have an advantage. For example, you could imagine a situation where you would need the ability to defend against air units, invisible units, etc-- where strategically speaking, building a missile turret is simple, it's a lot more difficult to quantify this into something a computer can process.
For example, we consider something like chess to be very complicated, and something like driving a car or holding a conversation to be "somewhat complicated, but definitely doable all the freakin time by humans". And yet, despite this fact, Computers are really really really good at chess, so good it's not even fair to have competitions between well-optimised computers and humans. At the same time, we're only JUST beginning to get to a point where a computer can pretend to hold a conversation, or drive a car.
The basic thing is, humans are good at some things and bad at others, and computers are the same way. For example, computers are probably bad at being stand-up comedians with original content. You might say "I guess this goes to show that stand-up comedy is even more complicated and requires a higher IQ than chess" or whatever, and maybe that would be correct. On the other hand, computers can quickly multiply really big numbers, or take natural logarithms in an instant that would take a human, even one armed with a slide rule, a pencil, and a paper, a long time. This doesn't mean that logarithm races are inherently more complicated and requires a higher IQ than chess, or SC2. All it means is that it represents a different kind of thinking.
It will probably always be the case that there will be certain domains where humans are utterly dominant, and certain domains where computers are utterly dominant. We're very different from each other. The way we calculate and process is different. And that makes sense; after all, we run on different hardware and operating systems from computers. I'd be much, much more surprised if computers thought in the same way as humans, and were strong where we were strong and weak where we were weak. No, the fact that SCII AIs are bad at SCII says nothing about the strategic complexity of SCII as played by humans. All it says is that computers are bad at it.
