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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

#271

Post by schwurb »

ionforce wrote: post #130
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…

I read that AlphaStar might be able to play this strategy because it is really confident in its defense skills. For humans, that might be taking a risk that is too big. That said, I want to try it out anyway :)

Edit: I recall that Rottie or someone said that there were 1-2 rare situations in HOTS where pros played like this.

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

#272

Post by saberience »

CydeWeys wrote: post #171
celeritascelery wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 play…

The point is, it's like being impressed by a calculator because it can multiply two massive numbers faster than we can... no shit, that's the whole reason we use computers, because they calculate faster than we can...

There's nothing impressive in coding something that can execute something far faster than a human, or be so accurate and beat a human. There were Quake 3 bots that could wreck any human alive 10 years ago because they react in milliseconds and shoot you in the head perfectly. So what? It's obvious a computer can do that. It's like being surprised that a bullet beats a human in a fight, that's by design.

I would be impressed if a computer learned from scratch without knowing anything about the game beforehand, about the controls, or anything else, with ordinary human limitations. Using vision processors to look at a screen to see the inputs and controlling a physical mouse and keyboard. That would be impressive. But watching a computer do perfect blink micro at 1500apm is just underwhelming, since that isn't new tech, you could hand code that without deep nets.

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

#273

Post by cdelsolar »

CydeWeys wrote: post #97
hughzhang wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that would be amazing if true, I'm pretty sure if you take away the stalker blink micro AlphaStar loses hands down to humans. This isn't taking away from Deepmind's victory at all, but I think micro was what made the AI come out ahead in this one. In many of the games, Mana had much better macro only to lose to blink stalkers.

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…

except Scrabble

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

#274

Post by vertline3 »

cjbprime wrote: post #249
vertline3 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such high actions per minute does not seem fun to me, and possibly a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen.

Wait until you hear about stringed musical instruments? :)

Well I have heard of them, also looked up TLO mentioned above, he actually did get RSI and had to take months off.

"Liquid regretfully announces that Dario “TLO” Wünsch will be unable to play for the next few months due to the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome he experiences in both hands. He will however continue to be involved with E-Sports even as he takes a break from gaming to give his wrists time to heal. Sadly, this means that he will not be attending Dreamhack Summer or the Homestory Cup III as a player."

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

#275

Post by confiscate »

gowld wrote: post #252
dx87 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another advantage was that the AI is just reading the game state through an API, it doesn't have to look on the screen. The game can be difficult to watch from a pro's perspective since they have to constantly click around the map to see what's happening, but the AI has perfect knowledge of everything it is capable of seeing, all without having to physically move a mouse to click on the screen.

What happens if a human tries to use the API with a custom UI of the human's own choosing? Such a UI might not exist yet, but are there ideas for more efficient UIs that could be built?

Yes I am curious of this too. What happens if the human has a giant TV screen that can see the whole map at once

Or, what if we slow down the game, so that the human can actually pause the game each second and consider what to do next. That's basically what the computer is allowed to do

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

#276

Post by nickpsecurity »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #188
cjbprime wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it was answered: AlphaStar pulled a huge stalker army that was about to hit MaNa's base all the way back home to (attempt to) answer the drop, repeatedly. If you have more complexity to your army but fewer army units, as MaNa did, a delay like that is how you win the game.

It’s funny because this works against the standard Ai too.

That's what I said on Lobsters. They were always good at builds, micro's, etc. The one thing they couldn't do was judge human intent, esp if they were being mislead (esp time wasting). I was waiting for one of the players to try to screw with its head to see what it did. Mana showed two gaps: the back and forth thing; that it ignored the observers giving up constant strategy information. Then, he got the first win.

Now, the questions are how many more such glitches will show up and can they eliminate them with better algorithms?

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

#277

Post by nickpsecurity »

setr wrote: post #108
celeritascelery wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mana got himself in the same situation where he was surrounded by stalkers on multiple sides, but this time the micro wasn’t so crazy that he couldn’t manage it, and he was able to take on one group at a time. The immortal drop, while unanswered, was not really that effectual.

That time, the ai didn’t really even try to engage. In fact, the ending of the match was marked by the entirely absent group of stalkers as the natural was engaged. It’s likely safer to say the AI was confused in general at that point, possibly related to the camera change, but we didn’t really get to see the quality of stalker micro that game

"possibly related to the camera change, but we didn’t really get to see the quality of stalker micro that game "

In software, changes in assumptions can break what depended on them. There could be many assumptions in its neural net centered on full visibility. They should probably retrain all or just some from scratch with the camera change in from the beginning to see what happens. Then, it will be firmly encoded into the strategies over time.

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

#278

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#279

Post by confiscate »

How does outcome prediction work?

It sounded like that was based partly on Supply (Army size). But the AI only knows it's own Army Size, and not the human's army size.

So how can the AI's outcome prediction be so accurate? At game 3 against Mana, the AI's outcome prediction changed from 60% win to 99% win, before the AI decide to go up the ramp. It had no way to know if the human had more army up that ramp

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

#280

Post by Veedrac »

rhlala wrote: post #254

Trying to solve Imperfect information games is interesting. But realtime game is not. As computer have edges in boring fileds (apm etc). I feel the real challenge will be Imperfect information, turn based, and cooperation( teamplay based) for ai. Unfortunately there are currently no game AFAIK with these characteristics... Like a 2d turn based counter-strike or dota/lol would be really the good format game to solve.

Competitive Pokemon with teambuilding would be something fresh I don't think existing techniques have figured out yet.

Not super prestigious, but IMO still a good intermediate goal.

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