Comment by tarsierscripter
3 days ago
The top players were losing a bunch to Pluto when it first came on the scene because they didn’t realize it was not a human and were playing normal strategies against it. Once they realized it was an AI bot they developed strategies to exploit it and can now win very reliably against it.
Pluto is very good at assessing relative army strengths based on units within its vision and will always engage when it judges that its army strength has an advantage, and it uses superior micro and targeting to win battles efficiently. The key weakness of Pluto is that it has no memory of units that are not in its line of sight, so it can be easily exploited with fast skirmishing and harassing units, drops, and spreading out artillery units to deny it from seeing the full army strength all at once.
Its other big weakness is that once you get an army advantage you can force it into a turtling position where it will never try to attack you and you can safely colonize the entire map with expansion bases, giving yourself an insurmountable snowballing resource advantage.
With respect, the wins you're describing are exploits that the next iteration of bots will fix. The "AI forget the Reaver exists", "AI doesn't understand how dark swarm works", "AI doesn't know what nukes are" are bugs that can be corrected, not big gaps in reasoning.
From what I've seen: the Pro's wins mostly rely on exploits, not superior gameplay. Those who fight without exploits lose pretty bad, just in the last few hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xga636MBOns
This is an interesting hypothesis but I'm not sure it's proven.
Obviously chess bots can beat anyons but this involves a situation where you're making 1 move at a time in a highly constrained environment: exactly 64 squares and a set number of pieces and so in. You also have, relatively speaking, near infinite time to plan your next move and as a result AIs can use a combination of databases and simulation algorithms to derive the best next move.
Almost none of that applies to starcraft.
We can talk about "teaching" the bot to handle other situations but that word covers a gigantic realm of complexity, like how do we encode this information in a way that the ai can actually draw from to apply to its current situation? If people talk about "more chess positions than atoms in the universe" or whatever, this is so many orders of magnitude smaller than the number of valid starcraft positions that we need to invent new numeric notation to accurately describe it.