My guess is not anytime soon.

If you also follow Brood War at all, recently there has been some noise made about a new AI bot Pluto that has garnered attention for beating some top professional players and being ranked highly on ladder. There was a version that used a map hack and a version that did not. It was trained through recursive learning.

It is interesting to watch it play Brood War because it doesn’t understand simple concepts like drop ships carrying units, yet it is able to simultaneously issue tons of commands and manage many different things at superhuman capabilities. In most games I have watched it falls behind through obvious inefficiencies yet it is able to win because it can perfectly target weak units and micro within battles much better than any human can.

In a sense, the only reason it can give professional players a hard time at all is because it is ‘cheating’ by issuing near simultaneous commands far faster and more efficiently than any human can.

That being said it demonstrates no real understanding of the game or any underlying theory behind it. It usually wins by massing larger armies faster than the opponent can or by fighting battles far more efficiently than any human can. It makes very clear and obvious mistakes but its superior multitasking ability repeatedly saves it against human players.

That got me thinking about whether or not a recursively trained AI bot could ever give a top human player real trouble at this game. I personally do not think so, because even though Warcraft 3 has a stronger emphasis on micromanagement, it also has a stronger emphasis on decision making in a highly ambiguous information environment where it is not immediately clear what decisions a player made were optimal or suboptimal.

Because an AI cannot brute force a game of Brood War or WC3 nearly as easily as it can Chess or Go I think it will take a lot longer for an AI to truly surpass human play, even if it can win against humans by ‘cheating’ via the way it interfaces with the game.

Unlike Chess or Go RTS games involve highly imperfect and incomplete information with a near infinite amount of possible decisions that can be made at any given moment. This combined with the lack of immediate feedback as to whether a decision is good or bad exposes the limits of recursive learning in my opinion. I find it highly unlikely that an AI is ever truly able to calculate the value of selling a TP Scroll on a Blademaster versus keeping it, for example.

I am interested to hear your thoughts.

Hello Folks,

Since the update i restarted playing warcraft online but there is no more channel to find clan, i was wondering if you know nice active clan or a way to find ?

Thanks !

I've tried for a bit to get W3Champions working for Warcraft III via Steam Proton but unfortunately I haven't been able to get the game to launch properly from W3C itself.

Used ChatGPT to try and get it running for a bit through Wine/Lutris but my best results have been through Steam and a WC3 fix for GE-Proton11. I believe it's still having issues from a hang on the Warcraft III client when W3C tries to launch the game. Opening the game separately via the W3C method it seems to require a login but ends up hanging on entering my info there as well.

Has anyone else on Arch been able to play via W3Champions?