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Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

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Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#311
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, those might have some impact, but it is clear that the progress is there, with this new APM cap and camera movement etc. You can also see in replays that the AI often makes mechanical mistakes, missing spells, missing units, even ordering wrong units from outside the screen - so it surely seems that if it's win rate was conditioned in any strong way on its sheer mechanical ability, it would have learned to not m…

The mistakes it makes are due to bad decisions. There have been no claims by DeepMind that they have some sort of chaos engineering [1] going on where the AI decides one thing and then the output system actually does another thing. Also I think you overestimate the AI/IT knowledge of these top players that they're consulting. I have great respect towards them, but they're not renaissance men [2] who both play 10 hour…

These live on air admissions of prior ignorance that you mention maybe for illustrative purposes, a PR gag to explain the difficult approaches to each other they had taken in development. It's like late night shows.

You must be one of the people who think really tv programs were really real.

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#312
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is that every videogame is a parlor trick in a sense. Unless you are a tournament player or someone who enjoys a really hard challenge, the bulk of the customers who buy the game just want to enjoy the illusion of a challenge. You don't really need a complex AI directing the hordes of enemies you want to defeat; you just want the illusion of battling enemies and emerging the victor, and ho…

> You don't really need a complex AI directing the hordes of enemies you want to defeat; you just want the illusion of battling enemies and emerging the victor, and how the game accomplishes this is not that relevant... Yes, and the current game AIs are completely and utterly incompetent at it. AI in video games only provides a challenge when the mechanics of the game are challenging or the AI is cheating. > Do we re…

> Yes, and the current game AIs are completely and utterly incompetent at it. AI in video games only provides a challenge when the mechanics of the game are challenging or the AI is cheating.

I wouldn't say "incompetent", but yes, the mechanics of the game must be challenging and/or (often) the AI must cheat. I'm saying this is enough most of the time; there's really no incentive to build a better AI for videogames because (my hypothesis) most gamers don't care. The illusion of challenge is enough, most of the time. The goal of videogames is to entertain, not to really challenge (again, with the exception of tournaments and competitive gamers, who are a niche within a niche).

You mentioned Heroes of Might & Magic in another comment. I played the heck out of HoMM2, some of (I think) HoMM3 and got bored with the rest. But I wasn't bored with the AI; I got bored because it was the same formula again and again. The genre itself soon felt like a tired formula. Note that the "AI" -- cheating or not -- of HoMM felt horribly difficult to me. I lost battles more often than I won; the only trick that reliably worked was to start the fight with a lot more troops than the computer enemy, and that's not much of a trick! Not a lot of places to learn effective tactics back then either, maybe the hellpit that was GameFAQs?

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a well executed strategy with few errors often wins, even if it wasn't optimal I think this is hits the chord with why a lot of people are talking about this bot as cheating more than they are being outplayed. It's like fighting an aimbot in an FPS. They arent outsmarting you, but the mechanical consistency is inhuman and you are unable to force mistakes. At best itll feel like playing someone on their best day. Th…

I don't think the comparison with aimbots is fair. Aimbots are more like a perfect micro. In the beginning (when they did their first show match), Alphastar was insane at that. Now the micro is not giving an advantage anymore. Where alphastar shines, is in making a strategy work. It won't attack into something that looks dangerous. It won't forget to build more units. It won't be distracted on two fronts. (That said:…

>Now the micro is not giving an advantage anymore.

I guess I need to learn more about the details here. Robotic consistency is a significant advantage, so unless it is handicapped I dont think the result is much of a leap from what we learned by it being insane at micro.

You can feel consistency on your opponent and it is extremely intimidating. Usually, players are consistent at different things.. like my micro might be much better with marines than tanks. To have consistent human-level micro across all units is already a huge advantage.

I agree the aimbot comparison is excessive, but the hyperbole was good for getting the point across.

You could take an fps AI with aimbot, and give it 220 ms input lag to say it doesnt have advantage over players anymore - but its still going to climb to the top of the ladder system because it isnt going to miss. It is either advantaged at aiming or disadvantaged based on that 1 number

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#314
post #237
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI that ships with games (even the hardest difficulty) are made to be beatable. Of course pros beat them.

You misunderstand me, I'm not talking about the AI that shipped with broodwar. I'm talking about third party AIs made via bwapi competing against eachother in the various starcraft AI tournaments, such as AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) Student StarCraft AI (SSCAI) Tournament BWAPI Bots Ladder https:…

Ah, thank you for the clarification, I did indeed misunderstand.

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#315
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is that every videogame is a parlor trick in a sense. Unless you are a tournament player or someone who enjoys a really hard challenge, the bulk of the customers who buy the game just want to enjoy the illusion of a challenge. You don't really need a complex AI directing the hordes of enemies you want to defeat; you just want the illusion of battling enemies and emerging the victor, and ho…

While there are certainly plenty of parlor tricks and other illusions, I think in the best case, a game can contain a finely tuned learning experience, where by training you actually do get better at something. (Often something unimportant, but still fun.) Throwing people into the deep end of the pool usually doesn't work so well. Scaling down the difficulty helps, but really what you want is challenges that teach yo…

I agree with everything you said :)

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it's only a matter of time though. StarCraft II also has a rock-paper-scissors nature to it though, so you wouldn't expect even a perfect player to win 100% of the time. There are some strategies that are hard-counters to other strategies, and because of the imperfect information nature of the game, by the time you scout your opponent and see what they're doing, it may be too late to shift and deal with…

> by the time you scout your opponent and see what they're doing, it may be too late to shift and deal with it. Unless you're Serral and your observers magically come out of nowhere and cover every single pixel of your base.

Like this is happens when you try to surprise Serral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTMIh9wzDjo

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#317
post #105

What would be interesting is to limit the AI processing speed to human capacity, which is something like 60 bits per second. In all these AI v. Human games I see, it is really apples to oranges because the human consumes vastly less resources and compute cycles to perform at the same level as the AI. And when I say 'vast' I mean Vast. There is like a quintillion factor difference between the AI and the human. There i…

> What would be interesting is to limit the AI processing speed to human capacity, which is something like 60 bits per second. What part of human processing capacity is this slow?

Our conscious thought. E.g. how many words can you read in a second, vs how many words can a computer 'read' in a second? Conscious thought seems to be the bottleneck in our processing, since we don't play these games unconsciously.

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#318
post #239
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don’t they ever just have a virtual mouse api or whatever, with some lag and some jitter just to make it an actual apples to apples comparison? The AI is supposed to call this API. Then actions per minute would be irrelevant.

I'm just guessing but I think it would be easier to start from a perfect system and progressively work towards an accurate imperfect system rather than the other way of guessing an imperfect system and working back towards an accurate imperfect system.

Easier but that’s cheating LMAO

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#319
post #105

What would be interesting is to limit the AI processing speed to human capacity, which is something like 60 bits per second. In all these AI v. Human games I see, it is really apples to oranges because the human consumes vastly less resources and compute cycles to perform at the same level as the AI. And when I say 'vast' I mean Vast. There is like a quintillion factor difference between the AI and the human. There i…

It would be interesting to see if there are any meta reports on people doing research on the topic of resource constrained AI. Has anyone explored whether or not an AI can improve on its own algorithm while being heavily resource constrained? Is the ability to use less resources a limit of our current hardware? Do we see the current hardware performance improvement trajectory being able to reduce the amount of resour…

Great questions. From what I can tell, AI is just as resource hungry as it ever was, if not more. The only difference is now we have more resources to throw at the traditional algorithms.

Re: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, AlphaStar has very low APM compared to human players. This is because humans do a lot of insignificant actions when button mashing, whereas AlphaStar is extremely precise with its moves. That's why when you compare APM graphs between Alpha and a human player, the human almost always ranks higher in actions-per-minute.

It's still a high APM game. Reducing redundant button presses still doesn't change the fact that APM is very significant and that being able to process information and act quickly is more important than pure strategy.

That's the difference between APM vs EPM in Starcraft.
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