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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

#171

Post by CydeWeys »

celeritascelery wrote: post #142
CydeWeys wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. right, and we saw that with the incredible precision with stalker blink micro. There are many ways you could make it more comparable to humans. They have already tried that by even giving it an APM. > You can't fault the AI for winning at the game because of…

I just can't help but feel that nothing AI does will ever be good enough according to this mindset, i.e. true "intelligence" is by definition things that computers cannot do.

Beating the world champion in Chess was, at one point, considered an impossible achievement for computers. Now it's considered so routine it doesn't even count as AI according to many. And in a few months when AlphaStar is beating top human players without having to use APM or viewport advantages, what will the next goalposts be?

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

#172

Post by freeflight »

andreyk wrote: post #74
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…

Also worth noting that it starts by imitation learning from pros. I'd be curious to see if the macro can be learned without imitation; a much harder challenge. Also, playing with full visibility as was mostly the case in the demonstration is quite lame...

If you learn, why not learn from the best, the pros? These people already have spent years figuring out what works and what doesn't. Why not draw from that pool of knowledge and instead spend extra time going through the same motions?

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

#173

Post by gwern »

taneq wrote: post #147
loser777 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take you up on that bet; they started with a version that tried to learn from scratch they seemed to have scrapped that approach.

I bet the very early internal versions of AlphaGo learned from scratch and didn't work very well either.

Correct. They started with pure self-play and it didn't work at all.

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

#174

Post by celeritascelery »

taneq wrote: post #158
celeritascelery wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"Yes but X has a tiny problem space compared to something like Y. People want to see an AI win because it's smart, not because it crunches numbers." 1980: X = Tic-tac-toe, Y = Chequers 1990: X = Chequers, Y = Chess 2000: X = Chess, Y = Go 2019: X = Go, Y = StarCraft 2030: X = Any video game, Y = ???

Is a AI that wins at Starcraft only because it has crazy high APM really going to help get to the next X? We could have built that 10 years ago. All it proves is that computers have faster reflexes then humans. That won’t help them become problem solvers for the future.

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

#175

Post by mactrey »

ehsankia wrote: post #165
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…

> While they have similar APM to SC2 pros Wasn't the APM closer to half that of the pros? https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-live-cms/images/SCII...

A huge part of a human's APM is meaningless spam, for example right-clicking the same unit multiple times to attack it, or setting the same waypoint thousands of times in the early game when there's nothing to do. The computer might be at double the human's effective APM, if only we had a credible way to measure that.

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

#176

Post by arcticfox »

freeflight wrote: post #162
sl1ck731 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of limiting speed isn't to make an interesting contest, it is to accurately compare the "math" instead of the speed the math is done at. It isn't surprising that its fast, the surprising part is that it can make human-like decisions. The only way to compare whether its thinking is human-like is to restrain it from "brute forcing" the contest through speed. The model has likely learned that the faster it d…

But isn't the competency of a Starcraft player is also measured on his/her speed? In that context, you can't really measure strategy without accounting for timing/speed because a lot of tactics and strategies only become viable once the player has the required speed to actually realize them aka "micro".

Speed is only interesting as part of fair human competition. It's trivial for the AI to win with speed and it doesn't have to be remotely smart about it. Serral (dominant world #1) was easily beat by 3 far weaker humans controlling one opponent - it wasn't even close. It's just stupid to even claim victory in those situations.

Making an AI that wins by outsmarting humans, on the other hand, is what we are all interested in.

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

#177

Post by CydeWeys »

arcticfox wrote: post #166
taneq wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of those 500 actions are actually useful? I haven't watched competitive StarCraft games for years but back when I did, rates were more like 300APM and even then the players basically spam clicked the background or selected random units non-stop and were probably only doing 50-100 actual effective actions.

> How many of those 500 actions are actually useful? Exactly, a human doing 500 APM during intense moments is going to be way different than an AI bursting 1000 APM with pixel-precision during the most crucial moment in a game. TLO spent a ton of time at >1000 APM and walked his army directly into enemy shots all the time. MaNa had much better control at ~400 APM. So APM is really irrelevant to control - for humans.…

I suspect that once the AI becomes good enough it will be able to beat human players using a much lower total APM than human players. We're not quite there yet, but it just needs a little bit of time.

As a hopefully illustrative comparison, you could give any top player a day of play time per move against the top Chess AI being given a minute of play time per move and the AI will still win. That's how much better the AIs are than humans now. There's no reason in principle this won't be possible with StarCraft AI too.

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

#178

Post by FlorianRappl »

abakus wrote: post #87

Hey, but isn't TLO a ZERG player?

Warmup opponent:)

They did the same with AlphaGo back then. First get some "good" player in there to see if they are on the right track. Then get a better player in there. Finally, prepare for a real showdown. In this case it would be ShowTime, Neeb or even some Korean pro (e.g., Stats). Maybe its time to switch matchups and make it PvZ - get Serral and then let's see if the current SC2 champion is good enough to beat this AI.

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

#179

Post by Laremere »

Jyaif wrote: post #83
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.

The AI lost because it completely messed up the response to the immortal drop, nothing to do with micro.

This was my read as well. It seems that Mana simply found a strategy that the AI had not found. Due to not having trained against it, the AI produced nonsense results. The commentators noted that the obvious response was to build a Pheonix and just completely shut down the harassment. The situation is similar to Alpha Go vs Lee Sedol match 4.

One of the hardest parts about these kinds of human vs ai expositions is making sure the AI has explored the full possibility space, so that can handle all situations. The techniques at play lack the ability to perceive a completely new situation and formulate a good response. (Though anyone who's lost to cheese in games they later learned easy counters for know that humans, while better than state of the art AI, aren't perfect here either.)

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

#180

Post by BigJono »

freeflight wrote: post #162
sl1ck731 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of limiting speed isn't to make an interesting contest, it is to accurately compare the "math" instead of the speed the math is done at. It isn't surprising that its fast, the surprising part is that it can make human-like decisions. The only way to compare whether its thinking is human-like is to restrain it from "brute forcing" the contest through speed. The model has likely learned that the faster it d…

But isn't the competency of a Starcraft player is also measured on his/her speed? In that context, you can't really measure strategy without accounting for timing/speed because a lot of tactics and strategies only become viable once the player has the required speed to actually realize them aka "micro".

That's exactly why it's so important to try and constrain the system to as close to human parameters as possible. You can't compare strategic prowess if the two players are playing at a completely different level. It'd be the same as saying MaNa is better than say, Maru (who has just won 3 GSL Code S's in a row), because he has stronger strategies against ~30th percentile players. It makes no sense.
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