Title
Evaluating real-time strategy game states using convolutional neural networks.
Abstract
Real-time strategy (RTS) games, such as Blizzard's StarCraft, are fast paced war simulation games in which players have to manage economies, control many dozens of units, and deal with uncertainty about opposing unit locations in real-time. Even in perfect information settings, constructing strong AI systems has been difficult due to enormous state and action spaces and the lack of good state evaluation functions and high-level action abstractions. To this day, good human players are still handily defeating the best RTS game AI systems, but this may change in the near future given the recent success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer Go, which demonstrated how networks can be used for evaluating complex game states accurately and to focus look-ahead search. In this paper we present a CNN for RTS game state evaluation that goes beyond commonly used material based evaluations by also taking spatial relations between units into account. We evaluate the CNN's performance by comparing it with various other evaluation functions by means of tournaments played by several state-of-the-art search algorithms. We find that, despite its much slower evaluation speed, on average the CNN based search performs significantly better compared to simpler but faster evaluations. These promising initial results together with recent advances in hierarchical search suggest that dominating human players in RTS games may not be far off.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games
Real-time strategy,Spatial relation,Search algorithm,Abstraction,Simulation,Computer science,Convolutional neural network,Computer Go,Artificial intelligence,Artificial neural network,Perfect information,Machine learning
DocType
ISSN
Citations 
Conference
2325-4270
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marius Stanescu1184.46
Nicolas A. Barriga2115.51
Andy Hess300.68
Michael Buro445845.66