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AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

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Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#121

Post by methodover »

olliej wrote: post #78
rcheu wrote: post #46

This is really impressive, I didn't expect starcraft to be played this well by a machine learning based AI. I'm excited to read the paper when it comes out! That said, I'm not sure I agree that it was winning mainly due to better decision making. For context, I've been ranked in the top 0.1% of players and beaten pros in Starcraft 2, and also work as a machine learning engineer. The stalker micro in particular looked…

it seems like in some cases at least it didn't have to move the camera (it had direct interfaces) which for some of the stalker micro battles (especially in game 3 or 4?) the battles were larger than the screen space -- it would not have been possible to micro that well if your control interface limited what you can control or where you can place them.

This is a great point, and something that seems a bit lost in the discussion:

In StarCraft 2, the game IS the interface. That is to say, the developers have constructed the game in such a way as to be difficult to control; and human mastery of the interface is a large percentage of the game. Strategy in the game is important, of course -- but this is not chess, where human beings are not limited by the interface of the game. In StarCraft, you are intentionally given a limited interface to monitor and control a gigantic game while under incredibly tight time controls.

And I should also note that Blizzard is extremely reluctant to add features that make it easier to control the game. I have a friend who works on the StarCraft 2 team. We talked at length about this one feature that he designed and proposed for the team to make a specific aspect of the game friendlier towards players. It was turned down for exactly the reasoning above -- the game is the interface. By making the game easier to control, it disrupts the entire experience; an StarCraft 2 that is easier to control is no longer StarCraft 2.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#122

Post by civilian »

lettergram wrote: post #6

So... I’m curious how long this will be before we can apply this to real life? At this point it seems like it’d be fairly complicated, but you could build a solid simulator for battles. Then direct humans and / or robots around the battle field as nessecary to win a battle. Upload a virtual map utilizing some point clouds, estimate densities, start with estimating enemy combatants, add some scoring metrics negatively…

There are a lot more variables that need to be added to for an "AI general".

- There needs to be a system for simulating real-world battles. (Since we need to iterate the AI, afterall.) In WW2 the WATU was a good simulation of German submarine vs. Allied Convoy battles, but I imagine that ground battles are messier. Link for background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVet82IUAqQ

- Autonomous directions. If a unit loses contact with the AI, what orders should they follow?

- Need to react quickly to changes in the effectiveness of weapons. If army-B has a Surface-to-air missile that has a 80% hit rate, rather than the estimated 40% hit rate, the AI needs to adapt.

- Different armies have different tolerances for causalities, both military and civilian.

I suspect you're getting downvoted because people don't like the idea of military-general AI. I don't really love it either, but it's going to happen. Hopefully we can encourage its programmers to include the Geneva convention rules for war.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#123

Post by tsbinz »

CydeWeys wrote: post #90
cm2012 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the showmatched they made the computer have to look at a regular screen to control, the stalker micro was much less impressive - and mana won.

For now. Give them another month. This is like AlphaGo vs Fan Hui all over again -- people knocked that accomplishment at the time because he was just a master, not one of the top players in the world. Well, not much longer, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the best player in the world. The ceiling here is going to be incredibly high, much higher than the level of play that people are capable of, even when restricted to a sin…

Lee Sedol was not the best player anymore at that time (not saying it wasn't an impressive/important achievement, but overstating it doesn't help either - the "beat best human players part" came later in 2017).

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#125

Post by tialaramex »

z_open wrote: post #49
Quekid5 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are planning on limiting the APM of the AI anyway. They did that in these games. (Or at least, it didn't abuse absurdly high APM.) It still had insane micro a) because it had a FoV which basically extended to the combined FoV of all if its units[1] rather than having to move a screen-size FoV, and b) when it micros it never really "misclicks" like a human would do under pressure. (This was most obvious in how…

>It still had insane micro a) because it had a FoV which basically extended to the combined FoV of all if its units[1] rather than having to move a screen-size FoV, and b) when it micros it never really "misclicks" like a human would do under pressure. 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 g…

Once machines exceed normal human play, further research does not focus on trying to make the machines play badly so that it's fun to face humans again. What ever would be the point of that?

Instead we just watch the machines versus other machines.

This is why we didn't see "AlphaZero plays chess versus grand master" games - they'd be dull, A0 wipes the floor with grand masters because it's an AI and grand masters aren't, boring.

But lc0 and similar have been entering computer chess competitions with (a clone of) the Google Alpha Zero design. It does pretty well.

Just as with TAS in speed running, you get a synergy. On the one hand, the machines play a distinctly different game, perfect on its own terms, a TAS run never succeeds in a frame perfect trick on the second or third try, always the first - the AI will never mis-blink a stalker to a pointless death. But human play continues, not against the machine but parallel to it, and learning from it. Golden Eye speedrunning was hugely influenced by TAS findings. Modern human chess is influenced by the machine chess play styles.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#126

Post by CydeWeys »

celeritascelery wrote: post #109
CydeWeys wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You play the game as it's written. Come back with another version of StarCraft that isn't so micro-intensive and we can see how the AI does on that. Chess and Go don't have any form of micro and AIs are nevertheless dominant there. I'd say, give AI development another year and I wouldn't expect there to be any kind of game, in any genre, that humans can beat AIs at. Whether it's Chess, Go, other classical board games…

> Chess and Go don't have any form of micro and AIs are nevertheless dominant there. Yes, but chess and go have a tiny problem space compared to something like Starcraft. People want to see an AI win because it’s smart, not because it’s a computer capable of things impossible for humans. If the goal was perfect micro they could write computer programs to do that 10 years ago.

Then maybe we need a better game than StarCraft to test this on? Some kind of RTS that's less micro-heavy, perhaps? Maybe even an RTS where you can't give orders to individual units at all, like the Total War series? You can't fault the AI for winning at the game because of the way the game itself works.

Even if you limit the AI to max human APM, it's still going to dominate in these micro-heavy battles because it's going to make every one of its actions count.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#128

Post by gambler »

CydeWeys wrote: post #90
cm2012 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the showmatched they made the computer have to look at a regular screen to control, the stalker micro was much less impressive - and mana won.

For now. Give them another month. This is like AlphaGo vs Fan Hui all over again -- people knocked that accomplishment at the time because he was just a master, not one of the top players in the world. Well, not much longer, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the best player in the world. The ceiling here is going to be incredibly high, much higher than the level of play that people are capable of, even when restricted to a sin…

It's not the accomplishment that people knock. It's the spin, the inaccurate article titles and the hype.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#129

Post by pmontra »

gamegoblin wrote: post #67
rcheu wrote: post #46

This is really impressive, I didn't expect starcraft to be played this well by a machine learning based AI. I'm excited to read the paper when it comes out! That said, I'm not sure I agree that it was winning mainly due to better decision making. For context, I've been ranked in the top 0.1% of players and beaten pros in Starcraft 2, and also work as a machine learning engineer. The stalker micro in particular looked…

In the mass stalker battles, the AI APM exceeded 1000 a few times, and no doubt that most of that was precisely targeted. Whereas a human doing 500 APM micro is obviously going to be far more imprecise. I think a far more interesting limitation would be to cap APM at 150 or so, or to artificially limit action precision with some sort of virtual mouse that reduced accuracy as APM increased.

I understand the spirit of the proposal but that would be like limiting a computer to add at most two numbers per second. It's OK if we want an interesting contest against humans but it wouldn't be a fair estimate of a computer math capability. It's also not the point of using computers to do math instead of a room full of accountants. I'm OK with the AI going as fast as it can and play superhuman strategies because it can be that fast. After all we'll not limit AIs output rate when we'll let them manage a country's power grid.

Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

#130

Post by ionforce »

olliej wrote: post #71

The gameplay was really interesting - i wonder if we'll start seeing the over-saturation of the main prior to first expand in pro games?

There are three things this seems to do. And what's changed is the perceived value of these.

1) Increased mining rate. Although there's a prescribed "maximum", as I understand it adding more workers, up to some limit, does yield more minerals beyond the prescribed.

2) Buffer against harassment. If you are over-saturated and lose two probes, you rate of income isn't affected.

3) Bootstrapping an expansion. All of the excess probes can be moved over to the new expo.

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