Master and (Drone) Commander?

• Training of hand/eye/mind.  Speeds of up to 400 keyboard mouse (macro/micro) tactical commands per minute have been attained.  Think about that for a second.  That’s nearly 7 commands a second.
• Fight multi-player combat simulations  for 10-12 hours a day.  They live the game for a decade and then burn out.   Mind vs. mind competition continuously.
• To become a bonjwa, you have to defeat millions of opponents to reach the tournament rank, and then dominate the tournament rank for many years.  The ranking system/ladder that farms new talent is global (Korea, China, SEA, North America, and Europe), huge (millions of players), and continuous (24x7x365).

That’s the tactics—but what about the strategy? Robb calls it a “tactical management game,” which is correct. We can discern a bare shell of the “strategy” we normally discuss in the higher level decisions concerning the composition and deployment of the force. And here we also see a different kind of strategic control at play, one much more having to do with the Cold War science of operations research.

One important cognitive aspect of Starcraft that has been automated is the evolution up the tech tree. The tech tree that the player must advance up in order to produce needed units, accessories, and tactics is deterministic, perhaps reflecting the real-world convergence toward a “modern” style of high-end conventional tactics. Starcraft as a game represents the purely tactical considerations of warfare as an elaborate game of rock-paper-scissors, in keeping with Clausewitz’s statement that tactics can be considered closer to science than other aspects of warfare.

It is a reflection of Starcraft‘s deterministic structure that the tech tree “build orders”, the most crucial element of Starcraft‘s mode of war, can be automated. A genetic algorithm infamously was derived to optimize build orders. But this is only possible because the build orders themselves optimize a very small piece of the overall problem, and one made possible by determinism baked into the game.

The use of genetic algorithms to produce build orders also interestingly enough mirrors the overall social, economic, and organizational structure that produces a champion Starcraft player. In the 1980s, Robert Axelrod created an algorithm tournament designed to find a best-performing strategy to the canonical “Prisoner’s Dilemma” in game theory. Using the tournament selection mode of genetic algorithms, Axelrod iteratively weeded out “unfit” strategies until a dominant strategy was found. Perhaps the process that Robb describes is quite literally “tournament selection” that produces an optimal Starcraft player type.

The most important element of strategy — translating organized violence into political payoff — is mostly absent. Starcraft demands the intricate steps needed to prepare the weapon itself (build older optimization) and immaculate skill at firing it (in-game command) but not the problem of ensuring that the violence make political sense. There is no security dilemma caused by the threat of Zergling rushes. 🙂

Because it is a videogame, Starcraft as experienced by the player is nothing close to the overall difficulty, uncertainty, and complexity implied by the overall in-game universe of factions, technologies, and personalities. The level of cognitive difficulty that must be dealt with is kept on the order of something that a single player can reason through. Of course, in even in the “closed” world of real Cold War military science (which Starcraft has eerie similarities to), this has been the stuff of military staffs, RAND and Hudson-like research groups, systems analysts, and supercomputers.

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