I noticed Pluto is running on a simple CPU? If so, that's very nice for future RTS games. You just ship (or use a server-client arch) a bunch of models of various difficulty levels to let players practice. Could we even get models tuned to specific campaign levels? I wonder how costly the creation of Pluto was.
In any game that requires reflexes and muscle based twitch accuracy and so on, usually the hard part is making the ai lose.
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.
StarCraft is in between, where faster actions can be a big advantage but choosing good enough actions for that to matter is hard enough that it took many years to achieve.
Can't that be fixed just be setting levels of reaction speeds?
At least when I first heard about trying to make AI play StarCraft against humans (not the built-in AI of course, which the pros wouldn't have any trouble with), there was a lot of talk about limiting their "actions per minute" to the same level as high-level human players. What confused me was the premise that someone hitting 200 APM would be doing 200 useful things per minute; as far as I was ever able to observe, a huge portion of those actions were either just to look at different things by hitting a hotkey for a unit or building in a different area or even just keeping their fingers in motion so that when they did need to do something it could flow from the movements they were already doing rather than having to actually think through starting and stopping.
People have been arguing about how useful apm actually is since roughly 5 minutes after people started measuring it.
That being said, there is a substantial difference between humans playing at anywhere from 50-500 apm and a robot that can literally micro every single zergling on the map at the same time and do things like avoid ever taking the splash damage portion of a siege tank shot.
Fair enough, that's a pretty stark difference. It sounds like the exact precision of the actions that a bot can do is pretty much beyond human abilities.