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Brood War Korean Translations

(blog.sourcedive.net)
314 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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jaeyounkg ◴[] No.42741363[source]
This was an fun read, as someone who's both a Korean BW player and a speech recognition researcher.

It's interesting to note that the original Korean transcription already has many errors, seemingly (and impressively) corrected by LLMs later on. For example, 12 안마당 빌드 (12 courtyard build) is actually 12 앞마당 빌드 (12 frontyard build), which might have been more understandable to BW players. Similarly 투에처리 빌드 (processing-at-two build? makes no sense lol) should have been transcribed 투해처리 빌드 (two-Hatchery build).

Therefore it may also be helpful to directly feed the slang dictionary into Whisper's inference process using contextual biasing. There are lots of ways to do this, but the simplest would be to increase the probability of slang words in the dictionary in the final prediction layer of Whisper by a constant factor. This is fairly easy to implement, for example by using HuggingFace's library: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/internal/generat...

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chongli ◴[] No.42742944[source]
I am a StarCraft fan and I have no idea what a courtyard or a frontyard is supposed to be! However I do know that the names of buildings, units, technologies, and strategies are usually heavily abbreviated in English. Perhaps the same is true in Korean? A 12 barracks build would usually just be called "12 rax", a two hatchery mutalisk build would be called "2 hatch muta", and a three hatchery hydralisk timing attack / all-in would be called "3 hatch hydra bust".
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starcraftgamer ◴[] No.42743308[source]
A lot of Korean slang is a little different. Source: not Korean but have been in the English community a long time and picked some stuff up.

"1rax double" is equivalent to "1rax expand" or "1rax CC". They use multi or double to mean expand in the early game. Instead of "cheese" or "all-in" they use "pil-sal-gi" which means ace/joker card or "han-bang" which means an army or attack on few resources.

I am not sure what short-hand they use for barracks, gateway, etc.

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chongli ◴[] No.42743734[source]
Instead of "cheese" or "all-in" they use "pil-sal-gi" which means ace/joker card

That’s a really interesting one to me! One thing I’ve noticed is that Koreans do not seem to have the same hangups / negative attitude towards cheese strategies as westerners do!

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eru ◴[] No.42746237[source]
As far as I can tell, there's no hang up about 'cheese' at the higher levels of competition even among westerners. But that might just be from the extreme Korean influence at that level?

The attitude seems to be that throwing in the occasional cheese is not so much meant to win the game, as it is meant to make sure your opponent wastes resources on defending against a potential cheese at all the other times.

This is very similar to the function of a bluff in a theoretical analysis of poker. Very simplified, the optimal frequency of bluffing is when bluffing just about breaks even against optimal play from your opponents. But throwing the bluffing in masks when you actually have good cards.

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1. otherme123 ◴[] No.42746775[source]
A failed cheese usually leaves the attacker so weak that the game is already lost. Cheeses are intended to win the game.

But if you are known to never cheese, your opponent might bet on greedy strategies, sometimes known as "economic cheese": you don't prepare any defense, and skip scouting, to build an overwhelming army all of a sudden at some given time like just after an important couple of upgrades that boost the army (a timing attack).

The "normal" play (economic growth plus scouting) is usually the superior strat, but if your scouting fails to detect a cheese attempt that must be countered with a very specific defense, the game is lost. The occasional cheese keep the players honest so they spend resources in scouting, instead of going greedy.

StarCraft has its own bluffing scheme, that is faking a build so the opponent goes for a specific counter, but actually going for something else.

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2. alfons_foobar ◴[] No.42747295[source]
This is a good example of a game-theoretic equilibrium :)
3. eru ◴[] No.42751901[source]
> A failed cheese usually leaves the attacker so weak that the game is already lost. Cheeses are intended to win the game.

> But if you are known to never cheese, your opponent might bet on greedy strategies, sometimes known as "economic cheese": you don't prepare any defense, and skip scouting, to build an overwhelming army all of a sudden at some given time like just after an important couple of upgrades that boost the army (a timing attack).

Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to say.

And the optimal cheese frequency is when cheesing has the same expected win-rate as 'normal' play.

> StarCraft has its own bluffing scheme, that is faking a build so the opponent goes for a specific counter, but actually going for something else.

Yes. I didn't say cheese was bluffing. Just that the strategic considerations around cheese frequency are similar to the math for bluffing in poker.