Almost 10 years ahead of schedule, an AI opponent beating a human at Go is becoming an afterthought. It really only took 280 GPUs and 1,920 CPUs. With this benchmark, the next boundaries to push with more and more advanced AI are in video games. Video games, especially ones that are played online with multiple human players, are still a complete unknown in terms of AI challenges. Modern RTS’s such as Starcraft and Age of Empires rely on severe handicaps for the computer in the form of extra resources and game engine manipulation to compete on the same level as humans. It seems extra fitting that these games are impossible to play without a computer. They require the capability of rendering multiple frames per second. No Player Two is going to wait around for you to animate a Marine on paper like Tic-Tac-Toe.

So how is it that the 10 year-old me could take down 7 other computers at the same time given the same start? What is it that humans have that computers are still trying to figure out? The answer is still the same as when scholars were having this conversation about Go back in the 90’s. The machines don’t have that latent and nebulous art of patten matching known as intuition. As defined by Swiss mystic Carl Jung, intuition is perception through unconscious experience, when something simply makes sense for no other reason than it does. Humans draw intuition from things we see, hear touch, from stories we relate to, or from people we love/hate. Intuition is common sense, the collective unconscious, and the personal well all at the same time. If intuition were easy to define, we would just simply write it as a series of x86 instructions and we’d be done with this already.

Go and Chess, although having many permutations of moves, is still a fair, turn-based, perfect information game. Given computational power and time, all the possible decisions are laid out in front of you. Video games utilize uncertainty such as Fog of War, units with varying capabilities for different factions and are played real time. There is no tree to traverse here, and the branching factor is no longer discrete. Instead you are presented with a continuous set of choices over the course of a 30–45 minute game. Without being told what to do, a computer does nothing. A human follows his/her gut.

The first steps towards a competitive video game AI are already in the works, and at Berkeley nonetheless, a location famous for similar breakthroughs. Some background: the eSports (hate this term, why can’t we just call it gaming?) industry has been growing rapidly in the past year, with prize pools dwarfing that of the majors in golf, and viewership in the millions across the world. The industry is married to modern concepts such as live streaming and crowdfunding. The game that started it all was Starcraft: Brood War back in 1998. It was the first computer game to be played competitively because it balanced the minutiae of unit control with sweeping strategy, was easy to learn but hard to master, and the battles were exciting to watch. The Koreans had dedicated television stations for the game a decade ago, and the very best players became celebrities. For our purposes though, we are interested because the entire game was eventually opened via API in 2009.

A team at Berkeley used the Brood War API to create a bot that single-mindedly rode mass Mutalisks to victory. Every single time. By abstracting away unit combinations and perfecting micro, the bot(called the Overmind) is competitive with humans but the AI itself is not very extendable to any of the other playable races, nor can it achieve victory in any other possible way. AI is strong at micro and resource collection(in theory), but the problem is adaptation. How do you collect resources when the enemy blocks your vespene gas? What happens to your micro when a player starts cheesing you with harass? A computer has no idea how to react correctly in a real game of Starcraft where anything could happen and stay on the path to victory.

Still, it is promising that there may be a general AI that can play Starcraft one day. There are some similarities between Brood War and chess/Go, such as having an early, mid and end game. There are quantifiable values for each unit and it is possible to establish an understanding between threat and position through seeing/remembering where the aforementioned units are. Today, players are still competing in Brood War for thousands of dollars and the admiration of Korean girls and probably won’t be too happy if they are bested by an AI. But the one-on-one nature of the game, and its similarities to existing “solved” games makes the Overmind loom ominously. It may not be next year, but it will happen. The true AI challenge lies in another game, one that has its roots in RTS, but is now considered a completely different genre, Dota 2.