I'm curious to see a StarCraft II mod where you can assign advanced micro behaviors to groups of units.
AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
431–440 of 459 posts
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#432Earlier 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? :)
From what I understand, the most common string instrument problems are with shoulders/neck/back, due to sitting for long periods of time with poor posture.
Most music should be playable without excessive risk of serious injury to arms / wrists / hands, but from what I understand very high notes on e.g. the violin are hard to play without using an over-flexed wrist, which is definitely a problem if playing music requiring such a position for long stretches of time, or many rapid switches between high and low notes.
Some of the string players with most risk are novices who have not been taught proper technique.
For professional PC game players, the design of the standard computer keyboard and furniture is absolutely terrible from an RSI perspective (worse than any common musical instrument, and without any of the design requirements of acoustic instruments as an excuse), and it is shocking to me that there has not been more effort to get more ergonomic equipment into players’ hands. The way game players typically use a computer keyboard is generally more dangerous than the way typists or e.g. programmers do. As someone who spent a few years thinking about computer keyboard design, I can think of at least a dozen straight-forward and fairly obvious changes that could be made to a standard computer keyboard to make it more efficient and less risky for game players. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit here.
Whether or not the equipment is changed, the most important single thing when using a computer keyboard (or any hand tool for that matter) is to avoid more than slight wrist flexion or extension, especially while doing work with the fingers. Excessive pronation and ulnar deviation of the wrist are also quite bad. Watching pro players, many of them have their wrists in an extremely awkward position while doing fast repetitive finger motions for hours per day without breaks, which is a guaranteed recipe for RSI.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that once the AI becomes good enough it will be able to beat human players using a much lower total APM than human players. We're not quite there yet, but it just needs a little bit of time. As a hopefully illustrative comparison, you could give any top player a day of play time per move against the top Chess AI being given a minute of play time per move and the AI will still win. That's how much better the…
The biggest issue with allowing the ai to have high APM is that it will inevitably learn optimal strategies that depend on that high APM, eg stalkers can take on far more immortals than we normally expect, and the AI will learn it this way, because the high APM allows a new stalker strategy (or rather, empowers an old one greatly) while not affecting immortals significantly. This also naturally means the AI leagues s…
What they're improving at right now isn't any specific AI model, it's how to train the AI models. It's meta-machine learning. I don't doubt that they can quickly train up a new model under different constraints now that they know how best to train up said models. It's not like they throw away all progress once they change some constraints; far from it.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a widely underappreciated fact when it comes to comes to comparing the 'training experience' of humans versus bots. And it extends far beyond processing 'sense data' - A human likely has some level of understanding of how the game works based on experience from other games it has played and from 'real life' - we know almost instinctively that 'high ground' is likely to give a combat advantage without having t…
Not only that, humans (and many other eusocial species) have an instinctual intuitional understanding of many aspects of game theory. For example, humans, even from infancy, prefer games where it is possible to punish cheating (i.e. take revenge upon cheaters) to games where it is not. This isn't just "we're animals that have evolved to enact tit-for-tat strategies [by e.g. injustice triggering rage] because they lea…
"humans, even from infancy, prefer games where it is possible to punish cheating...this is actual analysis—instantaneous, intuitive analysis—of a system of rules, to notice, in advance of ever being slighted"
[Citation needed]
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can see the alphastar perspective of that 11th game here: https://youtu.be/H3MCb4W7-kM?t=5195
It struggles with camera placement like real players :) And uses popular divert-attention tactics, which shows it understand that part of the game - for example when it sends oracles to mineral line at the same time as it attacks in front. Previous versions didn't do that, because they were taught playing vs cheating AI - so no point diverting attention of something that has instant access to any unit on the map :)
It also struggles to defend against adept harras beacuse it has "tunnel vision" - controls its oracle instead of defending probes at home. Mana actually managed his attention budget a lot better (this is a crucial pro-player skill in starcraft - harras is effective because it trades little of your attention for a lot of attention of the enemy, it's a skill that becomes irrelevant when opponent doesn't really have "attention" and can perceive and interact with all units on the map at once like previous version of alphastar).
This one is much more human, and much lower level. In my opinion it lost unfair advantage, so the mistakes in its errormaking are revealed. Previously it never was behind and never had to react to human player strategy - it rarely even scouted because what's the point - it wanted to build mass stalkers anyway.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#436This 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…
One macro technique used by AlphaStar agents that is not used by human pros is building extra workers beyond currently exploitable capacity. This gives them reserves when attacked and some workers killed. They can also ramp up mining at a new base quickly by moving the extra workers there. Apparently the benefits outweigh the costs for these workers for AlphaStar. It will be interesting to see if some pros decide to…
I bet there's a sweet spot in-between that will come out of this, like saturating your natural to 24 workers minutes before expanding.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#437200 years of blink stalker meta... Overcoming the local minimum trap is still a thing.
funnily enough, human players were also obsessed with blink stalkers for years ;)
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the mass stalker battles, the AI APM exceeded 1000 a few times, and no doubt that most of that was precisely targeted. Whereas a human doing 500 APM micro is obviously going to be far more imprecise. I think a far more interesting limitation would be to cap APM at 150 or so, or to artificially limit action precision with some sort of virtual mouse that reduced accuracy as APM increased.
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…
So, in some sense this is a limitation of starcraft. The goal of this project is presumably have the AI play a high strategic depth game. However, with sufficiently high micro certain strategies that have low "macro depth" become unbeatable. So it's true the AI would win, but it plays in ways that do not expand our understanding of SC strategy, it is simply using a simple to understand and impossible for human to execute strategy. Think of aimbot in a shooting game, a human can try to play smart and attack from unusual angles/lay traps/crossfires, but if the AI can simply get instant headshots the AI can run straight to objective and win. It would be a winning play, and humans understand why it would be a winning play (boringly so), but it is outside of human execution.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
except Scrabble
I assume you’re joking, but just in case you aren’t, Scrabble bots have outperformed top humans for 20 years with little more than a basic Monte Carlo tree search.
they haven't; I'm a tournament Scrabble player and the best program beats the best players at most 50% of the time.
Re: AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They actually have this game mode built in, it's called Archon mode.
Aha, nice, thanks. Let's see, two players per side... not a huge number but probably a big step up from one. Looks like people aren't playing it much; some people suggest it's because that requires a partner.
I would like to see a setup akin to that of Ender Wiggin, with one commander overseeing and recommending overall strategy, and, say, five others managing different areas or groups. That seems like the way to get the best human performance, and might be enough to beat the AIs—at least to nullify chunks of their advantage.