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.
For now. Give them another month. This is like AlphaGo vs Fan Hui all over again -- people knocked that accomplishment at the time because he was just a master, not one of the top players in the world. Well, not much longer, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the best player in the world. The ceiling here is going to be incredibly high, much higher than the level of play that people are capable of, even when restricted to a sin…
Just FYI, Lee Sedol wasn't the best player in the world at that time (nor is he now). AlphaGo went ahead and beat the actual #1, Ke Jie, 3-0.
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…
If you don't put any limits on the AI, it's not Starcraft any more.
You could make an AI which tries to hack the human computer to force a leave. That would also constitute a "win". Or one which hacks its own computer and displays "You win" immediately. Or one which tries to kill the human player, if we want to be really dramatic about it.
> 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…
Depending on how you define Chess, seeing the pieces and physically moving them is part of it as well. Chess-playing AIs haven't been required to have robot components because that's not the interesting part of the challenge of Chess. I'd argue the same is true of StarCraft, even more so, given that it's an innately computer-based game in a way that Chess is not. It seems arbitrary to require the presence of an elect…
> It seems arbitrary to require the presence of an electronic-to-physical bridge in the form of a robot only to then operate physical-to-electronic bridges in the form of a keyboard and mouse.
It's not at all arbitrary. SC2 match is won by a combination of reflexes and physical quickness with which the actions are executed, and strategy.
The whole point is to even the playing field in the area of the physical limitations so that only the strategy part is the difference. You know, the "Artificial INTELLIGENCE" part?
This doesn't nullify the observations that people are making here. Part of the difficulty here is describing what a 'fair' match might be. Specifically, I think fairness has to do with a goal many people have for AI: to improve human play. The strategies in Chess or Go that were employed could conceivably be used by human players. There aren't any hard restrictions preventing humans from learning from that play, even…
None of this really matters though. The AI is improving every day through training. Give it another few months of development and it'll be able to trounce humans under any "fair" set of handicaps you can think of, like limiting average and max APM throughout the game. We saw the same pattern with AlphaGo. There's no reason whatsoever to suppose that humans are fundamentally better at this game than an AI can be. When…
It's tempting to assume the AI will just keep getting better and better, but that's not guaranteed, and I was happy to see that the Deepmind folks in the video clearly acknowledged this. In the game that MaNa won, it's possible that he did so by finding a strategy the AI agent had never encountered before, causing it to respond with nonsense (e.g. not building a Phoenix and pulling its entire stalker army back to deal with warp prism harrassment). In a game with a strategy space as large as SC2, it's possible that an AI will never be able to saturate the space of viable strategies, and it will always be possible to find edge cases that the AI has no idea how to handle.
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 would be right if AI and human player had the same opportunities for micro. They don't, because AI doesn't use physical objects to move stuff in the game. AI just "thinks" that this stalker should blink and it blinks. Human player has to deal with inertia of his hand and of mouse. If you want fair competition of micro - make a robot that watches screen through it's camera, moves mouse and presses keys to play st…
you don't really need a real robot, but assign some "time cost" for various actions which depends on spatial distance and type of action and if it is a different action than the previous action. humans are really fast when for example splitting a group of units but performing multiple different actions on different areas on the screen or even multiple screens takes a lot longer. They don't need to fully emulate human behaviour but getting somewhat close would really show how strong teh AI is tactically and strategically without superhuman micromanagement.
Because that is what we need to teach AI to do, build bases, extract resources, and build units to go out and kill everything else on the map :-) It is an impressive result, it seems pretty clear to me that as a force multiplier for developing decision tree software this technique works faster and more effectively than the waterfall techniques, and it gets better post release. But beyond the game theoretic applicatio…
I think the first ever applications of a more generic AI will be in corporate and military anyway, so yeah, the AI will build bases, extract resources and send security units to kill everything else on the map indeed.
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.
And against human players up to Masters 3 or so :) When you're still using the all-army hotkey, defending with a small and precise group isn't happening.
Where does it say the APM spiked during battles? If it's using it head-to-head with the human player, then that's bad, but how do you know it's not just herding workers and units individually? I get the analogy but based on the distribution, 75% of the APM for alphastar is below the mean of APM for the human during gameplay. Following that analogy, both cars are on the racetrack, except one is applying acceleration w…
The APM maxed out at 1500 at one point, far in excess of any human, especially considering many human actions are meaningless actions or spam clicks. The AI could win based on inhuman micro with stalkers and blink. I would be far more interested in seeing the agent with a fully realistic camera and fully realistic apm limit.
It does make a difference, because if the APM spike is during a head-on interaction with the human then it provides a competitive advantage, if it's randomly during another part of the match, then it doesn't provide a competitive advantage.
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?
Even allowing players to zoom out would give huge advantages, that's why no matter the screen size you have to play at the same zoom. There was a bug at one point that allowed players to play multiplayer zoomed out and it was forbidden to use it in competetive games.
This doesn't nullify the observations that people are making here. Part of the difficulty here is describing what a 'fair' match might be. Specifically, I think fairness has to do with a goal many people have for AI: to improve human play. The strategies in Chess or Go that were employed could conceivably be used by human players. There aren't any hard restrictions preventing humans from learning from that play, even…
None of this really matters though. The AI is improving every day through training. Give it another few months of development and it'll be able to trounce humans under any "fair" set of handicaps you can think of, like limiting average and max APM throughout the game. We saw the same pattern with AlphaGo. There's no reason whatsoever to suppose that humans are fundamentally better at this game than an AI can be. When…
The point isn't that the AI won't improve or win with those conditions; I agree it likely will, and soon. The point is that the conditions of the match matter and that this one missed the mark.
It absolutely does matter whether the AI can use obviously super-human techniques, because then it's not nearly as interesting for human observers. I'd much rather watch an AI that was a strategic genius that won despite being hamstrung in terms of micro/techniques.
> There's no reason whatsoever to suppose that humans are fundamentally better at this game than an AI can be.