AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by georgeek » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 12:52 PM UTC

dlubarov wrote: post #303

gamegoblin wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

TLO seems to have a longer tail than AlphaStar in that graph though, so doesn't that imply that TLO peaked at an even higher APM, presumably during battles? Fair point about humans needing minor adjustments though. Another comment also mentioned a bug in the APM measurement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18994350

TLO is a Zerg player, so he probably does a lot more errors when playing Protoss. Also, every top player estimates when to do a sequence of actions and spams it a few times to maximize the chance of execution. Meanwhile Alphastar only has to do that once.

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

#392

Post by posterboy » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

celeritascelery wrote: post #216

CydeWeys wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I just can't help but feel that nothing AI does will ever be good enough It can be good enough in a certain problem space, such as chess. But unlike chess or go, which are purely mental games, Starcraft has large physical component (vision, APM, reaction time). It can make it hard to determine when it has “mastered” this RTS. Like you said, it may be a few more months (years?) before AlphaStar can master Starcraft…

I said before, you could just integrate the intelligent micro part of the Ai into the game for humans to control.

For game design the problem is, the border to macro is not a straight line, but fuzzy, so how far does it go.

For SC2 and this specific bot, the problem isn't there, if the AI merely controls a strategy over hard coded tactics.

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

#393

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 12:58 PM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #204

celeritascelery wrote: post #174

Earlier 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.

You seem to forget the way it learned to play every part of the game (not just micro fights). That is, not by having any developer code any rules, but simply by "looking" and "playing". That's the great accomplishment and nothing like that could have been done 10 years ago.

[deleted]

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

#394

Post by ajuc » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

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…

Mana tried to outblink an AI?

Damn I really need to watch these games :)

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

#395

Post by sabas123 » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

cjbprime wrote: post #258

ascar wrote: post #18

It's amazing what they achieved so far, but I wonder how it would stack up against Serral, who draws a lot of his wins by supremely judging an engagement and continiously gains small advantages over the course of a game. This is a skill even most other professional players only have on a much lower level.

Yes, a best of 9 (?) match against Serral or Maru needs to happen.

But only if they get material to prepare with

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

#396

Post by posterboy » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 1:33 PM UTC

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #242

derefr wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Humans are pretty unique in that regard, though; pretty much no other animal is like that. It's easier to understand human neonatal development if you just considering all humans to be born premature. (It'd be really interesting to know whether that's literally true—whether keeping a human baby in the womb for an extra few months would actually result in the same stages of mental development being passed that o…

I've read somewhere that we are basically born prematurely (as you said) because if we waited any longer then our enlarged head sizes would make delivery quite possibly fatal.

Maybe off-topic, but that's one side of the coin, and I suppose the other is that being exposed to more sensory input accelerates development, or makes it even possible (on higher levels of cognition). If this wasn't the case, why wouldn't we just be bigger and carry longer? Is size viz megafauna really that suboptimal for any more significant reasons than being hunted human hunters? I would almost say that longer pre-natal development was suboptimal, because we'd either become bored, or supersmart, but anyhow superegoistic for lack of nurture.

Calling it premature is ironic, if we reach nominal maturity only after 10 or more years as far as fertility is concerned--the equivalent in AI would be the procreation of a neural net, perhaps after exploiting a bug in the game, breaking out to rewrite a better version of itself, or colluding with itself in self play. Yes, this is going off-topic.

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

#397

Post by ajuc » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 1:36 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #364

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…

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…

The problem with starcraft is - interface overhead is significant part of the game. AI doesn't have to cope with that - every click is perfect, and moving the mouse from one edge of the screen to the other takes no time.

If you want to make it fair - place an AI-steered robot in front of the screen, and make it record the screen with camera, and actually move the mouse and press the keys.

Then I can agree it's fair :)

But then of course AI would be incredibly bad.

Right now the advantage doesn't come from faster thinking, but from much higher bandwith and precision that AI has when controlling the game. It's anything but fair.

With chess it's not a problem, because interface overhead is negligible.

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

#398

Post by dpflan » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 1:56 PM UTC

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/deepmind-starcraft-results-a...

"In a final match against Komincz, streamed live on Twitch, the DeepMind team used a new agent that, unlike those in the other matches, could only see by moving the focus of the in-game camera. As a result, the AI was forced to move its units in a more focussed, human-like way. Despite dominating the game early on, AlphaStar lost. In all the games contested to date, the score is: AlphaStar 10 - Humans 1."

I'm not quite sure I follow the test then. How was DeepMind making decisions before? In a less-human-like way?

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

#399

Post by etiam » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

dev_dull wrote: post #292

Here’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.

In the very long run it's hard to see that we could compete with arbitrary scalability and lightning fast operations. In present and imminent situations, I thing Louis Rosenberg had an exceedingly important point in

"Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Just About Intelligence, but Manipulating Humanity: AlphaGo's true accomplishment isn't learning to play Go, but learning to play (and manipulate) us." (https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence-isnt-intelligen...)

, around the last AlphaFoo.

"Imagine a flying saucer lands in Time Square and an alien steps out carrying the game of Go. He walks up the nearest person and says the classic line – “Take me to your best player.” Now, let’s assume that the alien spent years studying how humans play Go, watching replays of every major match.

If that was the situation, it would seem Humanity was being set up for an unfair challenge.

After all, the alien had the opportunity to thoroughly prepare for playing humans, while the humans had no opportunity to prepare for playing aliens. The humans would likely lose. And that’s exactly what happened last month when an “alien intelligence” named AlphaGo played the human Go master, Lee Sedol. The human lost in 4 out of 5 games. But, if we look at the big picture, it wasn’t a fair match."

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

#400

Post by waterhouse » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

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?

How about having multiple humans control the same faction, so one can focus on building, two on a couple of battle groups, another on scouting, etc.? Then they don't have to context switch nearly so much.