AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

Then come the HN comments.

For Alpha Go:

Oh this is impressive but can't generalize. Wake me up when it doesn't have to have information precoded/doesn't learn from human players

For alpha go 0:

So this is cool but not amazing because they're all perfect information games.

And now here we have this, and people who haven't even watched the presentation are yammering about stuff like the APM, or how this isn't impressive because of ... Well, something?

If I believed in a terminator scenario, I would point out that a robot, too, will presumably have higher APM than all of us desk warriors.

It really feels like there are just some people who are religiously attached to being the only known intelligent entities on the planet, to the point where, when presented with evidence that hey, this is actually a thing, they will stick their fingers in their ears and shout about how unreal/unfair it all is.

I invite you to have a look back at the other announcement threads from Deepmind and OpenAI. I decided not to directly quote people as I don't want this to get personal, but I couldn't just sit here and watch the same old story play out again without at least mentioning that these same people have been wrong, and wrong, and wrong, and will presumably continue to be wrong.

Exponential curves are unintuitive.

1. While it's true that a human player could see everything the AI is seeing, the human player has to spend time and clicks to go see those things, whereas the AI sees it all simultaneously without having to use any actions or spend any time to take it in.

2. Emphasis on the computer seeing it all simultaneously. The computer can see the state of two health bars on opposite sides of the map at the same time, or 100 healthbars in a hundred places at a time. A human cannot do that, and even trying to move the view around fast enough to do so would render it impossible to actually do anything else.

3. If it's true that seeing more at once is not advantageous, then it must also be true that seeing less at once is not disadvantageous. So by that reasoning a player playing on a 1 inch x 1 inch screen would not have any disadvantage, since after all they're getting just the same amount of information as long as they move the screen around enough! Reducto ad absurdum, a player with a 1 pixel x 1 pixel screen has no disadvantage either, because they have access to the same information as long as they move around quick enough. It quickly becomes evident that smaller screens inhibit your knowledge of the game state, and therefore larger screen benefit your knowledge of the game state.

This is an oversight that I imagine they will eventually fix as well. Doesn't make sense to allow the AI to do this, because the focus is on the AI understanding the game.

>Anyway, disagree about BW. Perfect micro in BW is possibly even more devastating than in SC2, IMO, because there are all these weird glitches that you can do -- the best players can do them some of the time, but no players can do it perfectly all of the time.

I didn't mention micro specifically, I mentioned abilities. The perfect micro issue can again be solved by limiting the AI's APM. They may be able to execute micro tricks, but not constantly.