Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

deepmind.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 459 posts

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

#361

Post by TulliusCicero »

kolinko wrote: post #91
andreyk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It wasn't a full visibility - Alpha had a fog of war. It just saw the whole map at the same time.

That's still a large advantage that humans don't have access to. Not just in the "pitiful humans can't take advantage of such a large viewing area" sense, but literally the game will not let human players zoom out that far.

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

#362

Post by TulliusCicero »

methodover wrote: post #121
olliej wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Yup, exactly. To add onto this, for people less familiar, there's a non-stupid reason for this: economy of attention.

Attention/APM is often called the "third resource" (after minerals and gas), spending it wisely when you have several areas at any given time that could use attention is part of the strategic and tactical decisionmaking. For example, usually in a battle you wanna be paying most attention to the fight rather than your base, but sometimes it's actually better to jump out back to your base to increase production or economy, and knowing which situation is which can be challenging.

Obviously, if you make the game mechanics too easy to control (letting the computer do more of the work), then this part of the game becomes less interesting, because you don't have to weigh trade-offs as much anymore.

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

#363

Post by TulliusCicero »

nardi wrote: post #197
hughzhang wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AlphaStar makes up for its slightly subpar macro with REALLY good at micro. Thus, more micro heavy counters like cheeses are unlikely to beat it.

The strategies might be subpar, but the economy sure isn’t. It consistently had better economy.

It was very good at microing its macro.

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

#364

Post by pmontra »

sl1ck731 wrote: post #137
pmontra wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I try to make my point clearer.

If we want to measure strategy, I agree with you, and out of curiosity we might do it. But the goal is winning, so is strategy important as long as it wins? The AI can take every shortcut it finds IMHO. People do take shortcuts.

Cars and planes bring us across the world exactly because they don't walk like people and don't fly like birds. Wheels, fixed wings and turbofans are shortcuts and we're happy with them. We can build walking and wing flapping robots but they have different goals than what we need in our daily transportation activities.

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

#365

Post by TulliusCicero »

modeless wrote: post #8

AlphaStar interacted with the StarCraft game engine directly via its raw interface, meaning that it could observe the attributes of its own and its opponent’s visible units on the map directly, without having to move the camera - effectively playing with a zoomed out view of the game Additionally, and subsequent to the matches, we developed a second version of AlphaStar. Like human players, this version of AlphaStar…

I'm guessing that while there's a delay for decisionmaking, there's no delay between when it decides to move a camera somewhere else and when it does move the camera (direct API access), whereas humans need to move the mouse or hit a key, which is gonna take at least like 50-100ms where they're not doing anything else.

When they were talking about delay they were talking about delay between new information -> deciding/acting, which I think obscures the fact that humans have to do new information -> deciding -> acting, where acting takes non-zero time.

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

#366

Post by jacobush »

gamegoblin wrote: post #255
a_wild_dandan wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a graph of AlphaStar's APM versus a professional player's: https://i.imgur.com/TXeLkQK.png Evidently AlphaStar also has a similar Economy of Attention (where the player focuses) to a professional player, at around 30 screens per minute. Additionally, AlphaStar's reaction time is around 350ms, a significant disadvantage over a pro. The skepticism in this thread is absolutely justified but I think it's important…

I watched all of the event live and I feel that that graph is deceptive. If a game is 15 minutes and has 3 main battles lasting 15 seconds each, and you use 100 average APM on non-battle time and 1000 APM during battles, your average APM will be 145 but you obviously have a superhuman advantage. This is compounded by the fact that almost all of AlphaStar’s actions are “useful” whereas a significant amount of the huma…

Hm, should be interesting to force the AI to use input commands through a "filter", where it can only execute orders with human level precision. And something similar for input.

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

#368

Post by donmatito »

jgrowl wrote: post #305

I wonder how useful ai will be in balancing games in the future. Games with more than one race and multiple upgrade paths seems like a nightmare to ensure that things are even for players that are equally skilled. It would be interesting to have a game that would auto-balance itself, especially if you wanted to add extra content without having to worry about throwing everything off.

Total War Warhammer is a very interesting case for that. Many, many races, units, items etc. Much more than Starcraft. And yet the balancing seems quite good! There are obviously tier1, tier2, tier3 races, but even these tiers are disputed and tier1 races rarely win tournaments

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

#369

Post by rootlocus »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #212
thomasfortes wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, put an eye tracker in a pro and you'll see that the eyes are constantly changing the focus point, if you can watch the entire scene with the same precision without the need to focus on it you're already at a nice advantage. As an aside, a few pro gamers prefer to play on windowed mode for exactly this reason.

Just supporting this. I remember the uproar when 800x600 resolution was removed as an option in SC2 around 2012[1]. [1] https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/sc2/topic/6201040181

> the uproar

I'm not saying you're wrong, but 6 posts with no profanity is hardly "uproar" by blizzard forums standards.

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

#370

Post by Nanocurrency »

hughzhang wrote: post #64

This is really impressive. Even though the camera hack / uncapped APM limits (only the average was capped) made this version slightly unfair since the ability of an AI to micro insanely well with stalkers is basically unbeatable, I feel confident based on this performance that Deepmind will release a superhuman AI with lower EPM than humans very soon from now.

I think it's "a lot" unfair. Waiting anxiously for the next version which will carry more limitations.
Post reply on HN