200 years of blink stalker meta... Overcoming the local minimum trap is still a thing.
AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
291–300 of 459 posts
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#292Here’s the question I have. Will it consistently beat the top player over and over?
I see so much brittleness in AI such as this. Humans are much less prone to “bugs”. In an evolutionary adversarial environment, the human brain invariably comes out on top.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#293How 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
In imperfect information games (like SC2) the outcome prediction implicitly takes into account the unknown.
Given what it has observed and what it has not observed, it is essentially comparing the present state to similar situations from the past.
You can see this in the replay-- at seemingly random times, its outcome prediction jumps up, even when it hasn't had any interaction with its opponent. But that's precisely why it's going up-- it notices that its opponent has not executed a faster rush or cheese that it's unprepared for, hasn't expanded early, and the scout has not been destroyed.
Similarly, after having won a fight, the worst thing that could happen is that a bigger force emerge from your opponents base, destroying your army and giving them a chance to rebuild. When that does not happen, you know that your opponent probably doesn't have such an army (because otherwise they are falling behind in resources due to being bottled up). Either way, after a certain point it's worthwhile to press on to cause more damage, because you're now far enough ahead in resources that you will win regardless if they manage to repel that particular attack.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#294Earlier 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.
If you watch the 11th game where pro player wins, (prior was a 10-0 shutout by Alpha), the AI actually lost because they rebuilt the agent to use the same forced camera perspective as the human - so there is absolute truth to this being a compelling advantage. It was able to micro multiple units in disparate areas by having far better spatial awareness. When they took that advantage away it seemed more even.
I don't know if we can absolutely claim that the limited viewport was the deciding factor in the 11th game, but it did seem to me that the Alphastar agent's blink stalker micro was somewhat compromised in that game compared to the seemingly superhuman blink micro in previous games.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The APM of AlphaStar was about half of the professional player in this match. Check out: https://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs?t=3189
But when it counts, such as during micro-heavy battles, it's much faster and more precise than a human.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#296Fun observation on the possible reason why they chose Protoss from the publicity standpoint:
Zerg — Too icky for some in the general public
Terran — Too human-like. Might clearly trigger the imagery of human-robot wars.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even the 200ms reaction time seemed overly slanted towards the AI. I don't think that is the actual reaction time of top pros, in the matches the AI played the human player would teleport in from complete invisibility and try to use an instant cast spell and the AI would have already teleported out. Yes the theoretically may have been constrained to a 200ms reaction time, but in practice the AI was playing at a super…
The game is difficult to watch, but does anyone honestly believe that an AI is going to have a difficult time parsing the scene if it is trained to do so? That to me just seems like a question of resources. We're pretty good at image recognition and segmentation now, and that's without the unlimited amounts of training data one could generate when using a controlled game environment with a limited range of possible a…
For real life applications, parsing the ”scene” would have impact as it could only convey imperfect information retained. In the game of starcraft the information is perfect when fog of war have been removed this together with unlimited attention (camera viewport) helps action potential and macro planning. No player is ever going to be able to consider precise strategy on the whole map perfectly in their mind. If deepmind wanted to mimic human limitations perfectly they would have to provide imperfect information for AlphaStar, e.g when providing information of locations of objects sample a random variable from a probability distribution which represent the location imperfectly and making that distribution bigger the longer the attention of the A.I wanders from the object both spatialy and temporal. Of course the usefulness of having these limitations is purely to model maximum theoretical human mental capacity and it’s use case could be to help explore strategies that work for actual humans.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm also excited to see the future of this bot when they demonstrate a terran AI with near-perfect marine/stim/medivac micro.
Perfect micro bots don't excite me much, because they've existed all along, and it's not an AI task.
The interesting part to me is that, as far as I understand, the AI figured out this strategy by itself, basically deciding that it would be a good way for it to win games, rather than being specifically programmed to do it. That's actually pretty cool!
Other than that, I agree, and am also much more interested in what happens when you have a more level playing field (using camera movement rather than API, limiting reaction times and CPM, etc). I look forward to future matches where this happens.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#299How 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
In imperfect information games (like SC2) the outcome prediction implicitly takes into account the unknown. Given what it has observed and what it has not observed, it is essentially comparing the present state to similar situations from the past. You can see this in the replay-- at seemingly random times, its outcome prediction jumps up, even when it hasn't had any interaction with its opponent. But that's precisely…
Yes but it seems impossible to manually assign a score to all those different situations? There are too many situations like that
Is the outcome prediction score, itself, also produced by AI training?
It has to be, right? Because it's clearly not just calculating the outcome based on Army Size of the AI and the human. There must be some non-direct way it's calculating the outcome prediction.
I mean, the hard part is accurate outcome prediction. Once you have that, it's easy to train an AI by just throwing CPU's at the problem and making the AI play a crazy lots of games
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is super deceiving and I'm kind of upset they posted this image, knowing it would mislead people not familiar with the game. The AI sits around during lulls at During the fights, the critical moments in when MaNa would top out at ~600 humanly inaccurate APM (this is 10 inputs per second), the AI would jump up to over 1000 - we don't know exactly what it was doing, but it was presumably pixel-precise. Meanwhile t…
Do you know why TLO's APM is sometimes so large? Did he actually peak at 2000, or is he using a repeater or something like that?
A thread from a few years back about TLO’s APM: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/4pnbv8/tlo_somet...