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

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

#261

Post by kadoban » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:11 AM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #172

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...

If you learn, why not learn from the best, the pros? These people already have spent years figuring out what works and what doesn't. Why not draw from that pool of knowledge and instead spend extra time going through the same motions?

Two reasons I can think of:

An AI trained from human strategy might end up more limited than one that could learn from scratch. It could be stuck in a local maximum of play and be unable to escape.

An AI technique that requires a large dataset of pro play to learn will be much more limited in terms of applying it to other games.

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

#262

Post by brianberns » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:12 AM UTC

rhlala wrote: post #254

Trying to solve Imperfect information games is interesting. But realtime game is not. As computer have edges in boring fileds (apm etc). I feel the real challenge will be Imperfect information, turn based, and cooperation( teamplay based) for ai. Unfortunately there are currently no game AFAIK with these characteristics... Like a 2d turn based counter-strike or dota/lol would be really the good format game to solve.

I think some card games meet your criteria. Specifically, Bridge, Hearts, and Auction Pitch (aka Setback) are all complex, turn-based, imperfect information games with some amount of cooperation. I’d love to see DeepMind take on one of these games.

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

#263

Post by aiiane » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:14 AM UTC

gowld wrote: post #251

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…

How can it do 1000 APM if if its reaction time is 350ms? (180/minute)

Latency != Bandwidth

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

#264

Post by arcticfox » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:14 AM UTC

a_wild_dandan wrote: post #241

gamegoblin wrote: post #67

Earlier 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.

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…

This graph is incredibly deceptive and I'm kind of upset they posted it. There are about 10-15 seconds of gametime where APM is incredibly important, and the AI boosted to 1000+ APM during those periods. During lulls it cruised at ~30 APM.

Meanwhile humans are literally spamming keys to keep their physical fingers loose and ready - they're not performing anything close to 400 useful APM on a regular basis (or in TLO's case - 1500 ... He kept walking his units straight into death while spamming keys).

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

#265

Post by NhanH » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:15 AM UTC

tsbinz wrote: post #123

CydeWeys wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lee Sedol was not the best player anymore at that time (not saying it wasn't an impressive/important achievement, but overstating it doesn't help either - the "beat best human players part" came later in 2017).

Lee Sedol was still top 5, certainly no worse than top 10 at the time. By all mean he wasn't the best and most dominant, but the difference with the top was tiny.

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

#266

Post by arcticfox » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:19 AM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #177

arcticfox wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many of those 500 actions are actually useful? Exactly, a human doing 500 APM during intense moments is going to be way different than an AI bursting 1000 APM with pixel-precision during the most crucial moment in a game. TLO spent a ton of time at >1000 APM and walked his army directly into enemy shots all the time. MaNa had much better control at ~400 APM. So APM is really irrelevant to control - for humans.…

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…

I'm sure we'll get there too, I just think it's a little deceptive how they've measured the APM at the moment.

StarCraft is more random than chess, so I do think it's possible humans will always be able to take occasional games off of fairly constrained AIs just based off blind luck in picking counter builds, it will be interesting to see what % that is.

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

#267

Post by Retric » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:19 AM UTC

backpropaganda wrote: post #219

arcticfox wrote: post #186

Earlier 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?

APM gets inflated by counting several single actions as multiple separate actions. For example a Zerg player may want to turn larva into 30 Zerglings, they do this by pressing one button and holding it down as the UI repeats a separate action for each larva transformed.

By comparison selecting a single stalker, and having it jump to a new location is much more effort, but counts as fewer actions.

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

#268

Post by schwurb » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:22 AM UTC

arnaudsm wrote: post #259

ehsankia wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "games", as it was a single game, and it came with the big caveat that they didn't have much time to actually prepare and train this one as much. The one that won against Mana was trained for 2 weeks, versus this one that only had one week of training. While the AI did have an advantage in terms of micro/camera view, it still was able to make decent decision making and independently come up with a bunch of i…

I would love DeepMind to put that AI on the ladder as they discussed during the last Blizzcon. The APM and camera restriction is not for entertainment, it's to develop intelligence rather than 1500+ APM. The interesting part of StarCraft II is decision making and the meta of the opponent, and we didn't see that today. Remember their Dota2 bot that was beaten by a lot of players after a single day. I want to see if Al…

I honestly do not think meta or strategy will be interesting in SC2. (Obviously as a player it will, but from an AI standpoint not). AlphaGo already showed us that it can handle strategy well; A good AI in SC2 will simply scout the minimaly needed amount of time to prepare the perfect responses.

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

#269

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:23 AM UTC

taneq wrote: post #227

saberience wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of our knowledge of how to play games and so on has come from our current lifetime. We do not have a "genetic memory" that means we have learnings from cavemen or some other such nonsense. Our DNA contains instructions on how to grow a human, it's not a mega hard drive with millions of years of collective memory. If a 19 year old is good at Starcraft, he's good at Starcraft because he spent two or three years pla…

We may not have "genetic memory" but a ton of human capabilities are baked in at the DNA level. Sure, we need to practice in order to specialise those abilities for particular tasks, but that's more of a calibration phase on a fantastically capable machine, rather than a construction phase. Totally agree with how impressive humans are, though. In fact, one of the most amazing things to me about robotics is finding ou…

[deleted]

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

#270

Post by neltnerb » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 3:24 AM UTC

lrem wrote: post #168

jgon wrote: post #150

Earlier 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…

I've recently watched a TED talk explaining how human perception has a lag of about a third of a second. Pro players might be better, but after noticing they also need to take an action.

My experience is that to beat 300ms requires there to be no conscious thought in the loop. It has to be muscle memory guided by higher level intent. It's like how the gunslinger waiting to shoot hits first, it's reflex instead of decision.