10 ms·

"so agents must interact with the game within limits of human dexterity in terms of “Actions Per Minute”." I am really glad they are limiting APM because other

"so agents must interact with the game within limits of human dexterity in terms of “Actions Per Minute”." I am really glad they are limiting APM because otherwise things just get stupid.

usaphp 9y ago
Would not actions per second be a better limit tho?
- yannyu 9y ago
  Why? Speed is in MPH or KPH, would it be better to go by m/s? The convention in gaming is APM, so they're just using the nomenclature that is already understood.
  - pavedwalden 9y ago
    Maybe what usaphp is getting at is that the AI could still gain an advantage by doing a set of actions much faster than humanly possible in just a fraction of a second as long as it kept its total number of actions that minute below the cap.
    - vmasto 9y ago
      Exactly. Most actions in idle game mode (i.e. when there's no active battle, micro or macro to be done) are null, the gamers simply repeat random meaningless keystrokes; this helps with being always alert and ready for anything that requires a rapid response. An AI doesn't need to do this. Source: Ex pro Starcraft (Brood War) gamer.
      - sidusknight 9y ago
        There no were BW pro-gamers outside of Korea.
      - taneq 9y ago
        > this helps with being always alert and ready for anything that requires a rapid response. I always wondered why they do that, just spam meaningless things like open/close the stats window or click on the background. Some WoW PVPers did it too (like Laintime, I think it was - played a warrior and ran around spamming the character window open/closed an mashing 'weapon swap' even when there was no earthly reason to do so). I figured it was just the result of too much caffeine for 18 hours a day. This sounds like it's more an equivalent of tennis players' dancing/hopping around, or martial artists doing their ducking/weaving thing?
    - yannyu 9y ago
      A 65MPH speed limit doesn't mean I can go 100MPH for some section of the road, and 30MPH for another section and still be in compliance. Similarly, an APM limit wouldn't directly imply that the kind of "gaming" that you're talking about, where a user/agent simply has to have an average APM over a certain period to be in compliance.
      - mulmen 9y ago
        usaphp's point seems to be that the period should be less than one minute. When the police measure your speed with radar they are not waiting an hour to average your speed. The same idea applies here.
        yannyu 9y ago
        Yep, I entirely understand the point. Consider that when the police measure your speed, they're still measuring in MPH. Just because the units contains a specific time-frame (hours), doesn't mean the measurement is made over an hour. Similarly, just because the units for APM contains a specific time-frame (minutes) doesn't mean the measurement must be made over a minute. A 150APM limit doesn't necessarily mean that the running average over a minute must stay below 150 actions any more than a 65MPH speed limit doesn't mean that the running average over an hour must stay below 65MPH. If a police officer catches you going faster than 65MPH even for a single second (or however long a radar gun takes), they can pull you over. The units of a measurement do not dictate how the measurement is made.
        avar 9y ago
        You say you understand the point but you seem to have entirely missed it, the same problem remains. The point of the APM limit is presumably to fairly emulate a human player, but the APMs for humans are obviously averaged over a minute. However, for certain things humans can initiate actions in SC2 in quick succession that, if sustained over a greater time period, would yield a ridiculous APM rate. Think a Terran player highlighting the barracks and tapping "A" really fast, say with a 10ms delay, that would result in 600 APM. Let's say a human can build 5 marines like that in quick succession. You're going to have to allow for temporary spikes in APM to not unfairly give the human player an advantage. But if you do that the computer is able to really rapidly execute more complex actions that the human can't because he's limited by the SC2 UI, whereas every action via the API is equally difficult for the computer. E.g. moving 3 different subgroups of marines out of the way of a High Templar Storm. I doubt any human player could select 3 different subgroups of marines from one big group and move them out of the way in 3 different directions within the span of 60ms (10ms for each action of select/move for 3x groups). So any "fair" APM limit really needs to be dynamic in some way, or at least take into account the complexity of actions (say highlighting a group v.s. tapping "A"). It's not at all obvious how to do this while retaining fairness and not giving either the human or the computer an unfair advantage.
    - uw_rob 9y ago
      APM isn't averaged over a minute time frame. I don't know the exact calculations they use ( and it has been changed a couple of times) but roughly, if you go above 5 actions per second your APM will be shown as 300. I believe the reason they use APM over APS is because 3.4 APS isn't as meaningful as 204 APM.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    Well it means the AIs could exploit it a bit by issuing hundreds of actions in the first millisecond and then waiting 59.99 seconds. I'm not sure how much of an advantage that would be though.
EGreg 9y ago
I would like to see IBM Watson dominate Jeopardy without a superhuman finger.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  Yes and no. I guess the more "fair" way to compare them at trivia would be to have a format where all 3 give an answer to every question, and whoever gets the most points wins. That's obviously not really jeopardy, and I'd be curious to know how Watson would perform purely on the trivia knowledge vs clicking speed. I'm guessing it would still win though.
  - ktRolster 9y ago
    "What is your mother's name?" "......let me tell you about my mother...."
- tantalor 9y ago
  Watson’s hand looks like a clear, Plexiglas, cylindrical soda can with a few metal screws in the top and a wire extending from the bottom that is connected to Watson’s Front-End Controller. The mechanical hand wraps around the Jeopardy! buzzer which is inserted in the bottom of the Plexiglas cylinder and is held in place by a clamp. Watson’s hand uses a solenoid to physically press the same button that the humans must press. Watson’s hand is pretty fast in terms of raw speed — it takes somewhere between five and ten milliseconds for Watson to activate the buzzer once it decides to answer. This delay is affected by the speed of the solenoid and other small, sometimes hard-to-pin-down delays inherent in the software stack. http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-buzzer-factor-did-watson-have-an-unfair-advantage http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-buzzer-factor-did-watson-have-... I wonder if the human decision-to-buzzer time is much slower?
  - infinite8s 9y ago
    Typical human response time to a stimulus is about 200ms. That of course doesn't factor in the decision time, but once the brain decides on an action it takes about 200 Ms for the signal to propagate to the relevant muscles.
indescions_2017 9y ago
OOTH, altering the source to remove any human dexterity limits and watching subsequent AI vs AI battles play out at 60fps would be really fun to spectate ;)
- scj 9y ago
  For SC1 BW, you can already watch https://www.youtube.com/user/certicky https://www.youtube.com/user/certicky for a weekly highlights broadcast / commentary of AIs. Right now there is an AI arms race where the previously dominant AI (Iron Bot) is being beaten by challengers. It used to happen when Iron Bot did something silly. Now it is happening because the competitors have really stepped up their game. The current board leader (krasi0) has a strategy similar to their predecessor (Terran Mechanical units: Tanks, Goliaths and Vultures). The alternative strategy I really enjoy watching is a Mutalisk heavy build by Arrakhammer. The bots have styles and differing capabilities. tscmoo is one of the more fascinating ones to watch in this regard, as they mix it up better than anyone else (and tscmoop, the Protoss variation has the best High Templar storm going). The AI APMs get into the 10k ranges at times. Watching the minimap can be like watching insects swarm. If you want to see a game between two AIs in progress, you can watch: https://www.twitch.tv/sscait https://www.twitch.tv/sscait While these AIs can pull off tactics a human player could not (what they can do with Vultures is incredible), at this point they wouldn't be able to compete with the professionals. Going back to an earlier example, I think I could use High Templars more effectively than any AI I've watched.
  - sanderjd 9y ago
    This surprises me - I would have expected the computer mechanics to be much better than what a human can achieve. Do you have insight into why that isn't true?
    - lifeformed 9y ago
      AIs can click faster, but humans still have better overall strategy and planning, which matters a lot in this game.
    - 9y ago
metachris 9y ago
Which is still about 350 actions per minute for a professional SC2 player, roughly 5 to 6 actions per second.
ktwo 9y ago
IMO there should also be a precision limit. The timing of actions should include human-typical jitter and the wrong action should sometimes be activated to simulate misclicks/fat-finger keypresses — e.g., messing up a control group by assinging a unit to the wrong number key. The bot must also not be able to act faster than human reaction times (~250ms), this could be enforced by adding a fixed delay to the observations. I wouldn't be surprised if human Starcraft II play isn't so much limited by decision-making as by the translation of decisions into mechanical actions, which in turn dilutes the attention devoted to actual decision making.
- branja 9y ago
  ideally they'd train it on real keypresses rather than actions
  - mulmen 9y ago
    Why would that be ideal? Wouldn't that just make ML at the strategy layer harder without doing anything to make the discoveries more valuable?
    - branja 9y ago
      to emulate human handicaps at the interface layer. I didn't say it would be free
      - mulmen 9y ago
        But why is that desirable? Why would we want to emulate the human physical handicaps in our quest to advance AI at a strategy level?
        branja 9y ago
        For the same reason the APM are limited: to ensure that what we are doing is really focusing on advancing strategy rather than brute mechanical skill. If I played against an AI using nothing but the rendered frames and sound of a game as input, I might not even make the stipulation on reflexes. I'd be humbled if I lost. As it stands now, most of the games I like have bad AI. Sure, it can be fun to play a hack and slash against lots of little, dumb minions, but FPS, RTS AI these days still don't cut it as savvy opponents. Often they have inhuman perception, direct knowledge of game state, or higher starting resources, but they make abysmal decisions. Yes, I realize these are unlikely, expensive goals and incremental progress is how things are done. I just want to know if it's possible or desirable to emulate actual human reaction time. Do you disagree this would in principle help separate strategy from godlike reflexes?
popcorncolonel 9y ago
Why not first allow the AI to have unlimited APM and beat humans, then restrict it later? Because I don't think we're even close to the easier problem.
- aerovistae 9y ago
  In what universe is taking 10,000 actions per minute an easier problem for a neural net than 100 such actions?
  - sidusknight 9y ago
    Have you played SC2 before? It's hard to explain if you haven't.
    - aerovistae 9y ago
      Yes, I have.
  - kbart 9y ago
    "In what universe is taking 10,000 actions per minute an easier problem for a neural net than 100 such actions?" StarCraft is precisely such universe. If you could micromanage units perfectly, you can do some amazing tricks. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs
    - SmallDeadGuy 9y ago
      I'm imagining an AI war where the next advancement is the micro of the siege engines to optimise targets and timing of shots to hit large groups after the initial splash avoidance. AI on both sides keep trying to maintain a one-step-ahead strategy which minimises/maximises casualties based on predicting the exact shooting/dodging strategy of the opponents. Will be interesting to follow developments in this area!
    - aerovistae 9y ago
jtraffic 9y ago
Philosophically, I wonder if it's better to just acknowledge the differences between AI and humans, and let them play to their strengths. It seems common to think that we need to constrain AI in certain ways to be more like humans, but the constraints are always artificial. APM is one constraint, but what about working memory? What about multithreading? We already allow the AI access to computational resources humans don't have. Why draw that line at APM, exactly?
- themacguffinman 9y ago
  I don't think they're constraining APM to make the AI more human-like. It seems more like they're controlling a variable, so that if the AI wins, they know it wasn't just because the AI could out-click a human.
JabavuAdams 9y ago
Currently, though, APM isn't a real advantage for AIs. They're still too stupid.

"so agents must interact with the game within limits of human dexterity in terms of “Actions Per Minute”." I am really glad they are limiting APM because otherwise things just get stupid.

usaphp 9y ago

Would not actions per second be a better limit tho?

yannyu 9y ago
Why? Speed is in MPH or KPH, would it be better to go by m/s? The convention in gaming is APM, so they're just using the nomenclature that is already understood.
- pavedwalden 9y ago
  Maybe what usaphp is getting at is that the AI could still gain an advantage by doing a set of actions much faster than humanly possible in just a fraction of a second as long as it kept its total number of actions that minute below the cap.
  - vmasto 9y ago
    Exactly. Most actions in idle game mode (i.e. when there's no active battle, micro or macro to be done) are null, the gamers simply repeat random meaningless keystrokes; this helps with being always alert and ready for anything that requires a rapid response. An AI doesn't need to do this. Source: Ex pro Starcraft (Brood War) gamer.
    - sidusknight 9y ago
      There no were BW pro-gamers outside of Korea.
    - taneq 9y ago
      > this helps with being always alert and ready for anything that requires a rapid response. I always wondered why they do that, just spam meaningless things like open/close the stats window or click on the background. Some WoW PVPers did it too (like Laintime, I think it was - played a warrior and ran around spamming the character window open/closed an mashing 'weapon swap' even when there was no earthly reason to do so). I figured it was just the result of too much caffeine for 18 hours a day. This sounds like it's more an equivalent of tennis players' dancing/hopping around, or martial artists doing their ducking/weaving thing?
  - yannyu 9y ago
    A 65MPH speed limit doesn't mean I can go 100MPH for some section of the road, and 30MPH for another section and still be in compliance. Similarly, an APM limit wouldn't directly imply that the kind of "gaming" that you're talking about, where a user/agent simply has to have an average APM over a certain period to be in compliance.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      usaphp's point seems to be that the period should be less than one minute. When the police measure your speed with radar they are not waiting an hour to average your speed. The same idea applies here.
      - yannyu 9y ago
        Yep, I entirely understand the point. Consider that when the police measure your speed, they're still measuring in MPH. Just because the units contains a specific time-frame (hours), doesn't mean the measurement is made over an hour. Similarly, just because the units for APM contains a specific time-frame (minutes) doesn't mean the measurement must be made over a minute. A 150APM limit doesn't necessarily mean that the running average over a minute must stay below 150 actions any more than a 65MPH speed limit doesn't mean that the running average over an hour must stay below 65MPH. If a police officer catches you going faster than 65MPH even for a single second (or however long a radar gun takes), they can pull you over. The units of a measurement do not dictate how the measurement is made.
        avar 9y ago
        You say you understand the point but you seem to have entirely missed it, the same problem remains. The point of the APM limit is presumably to fairly emulate a human player, but the APMs for humans are obviously averaged over a minute. However, for certain things humans can initiate actions in SC2 in quick succession that, if sustained over a greater time period, would yield a ridiculous APM rate. Think a Terran player highlighting the barracks and tapping "A" really fast, say with a 10ms delay, that would result in 600 APM. Let's say a human can build 5 marines like that in quick succession. You're going to have to allow for temporary spikes in APM to not unfairly give the human player an advantage. But if you do that the computer is able to really rapidly execute more complex actions that the human can't because he's limited by the SC2 UI, whereas every action via the API is equally difficult for the computer. E.g. moving 3 different subgroups of marines out of the way of a High Templar Storm. I doubt any human player could select 3 different subgroups of marines from one big group and move them out of the way in 3 different directions within the span of 60ms (10ms for each action of select/move for 3x groups). So any "fair" APM limit really needs to be dynamic in some way, or at least take into account the complexity of actions (say highlighting a group v.s. tapping "A"). It's not at all obvious how to do this while retaining fairness and not giving either the human or the computer an unfair advantage.
  - uw_rob 9y ago
    APM isn't averaged over a minute time frame. I don't know the exact calculations they use ( and it has been changed a couple of times) but roughly, if you go above 5 actions per second your APM will be shown as 300. I believe the reason they use APM over APS is because 3.4 APS isn't as meaningful as 204 APM.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  Well it means the AIs could exploit it a bit by issuing hundreds of actions in the first millisecond and then waiting 59.99 seconds. I'm not sure how much of an advantage that would be though.

EGreg 9y ago

I would like to see IBM Watson dominate Jeopardy without a superhuman finger.

ehsankia 9y ago
Yes and no. I guess the more "fair" way to compare them at trivia would be to have a format where all 3 give an answer to every question, and whoever gets the most points wins. That's obviously not really jeopardy, and I'd be curious to know how Watson would perform purely on the trivia knowledge vs clicking speed. I'm guessing it would still win though.
- ktRolster 9y ago
  "What is your mother's name?" "......let me tell you about my mother...."
tantalor 9y ago
Watson’s hand looks like a clear, Plexiglas, cylindrical soda can with a few metal screws in the top and a wire extending from the bottom that is connected to Watson’s Front-End Controller. The mechanical hand wraps around the Jeopardy! buzzer which is inserted in the bottom of the Plexiglas cylinder and is held in place by a clamp. Watson’s hand uses a solenoid to physically press the same button that the humans must press. Watson’s hand is pretty fast in terms of raw speed — it takes somewhere between five and ten milliseconds for Watson to activate the buzzer once it decides to answer. This delay is affected by the speed of the solenoid and other small, sometimes hard-to-pin-down delays inherent in the software stack. http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-buzzer-factor-did-watson-have-an-unfair-advantage http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-buzzer-factor-did-watson-have-... I wonder if the human decision-to-buzzer time is much slower?
- infinite8s 9y ago
  Typical human response time to a stimulus is about 200ms. That of course doesn't factor in the decision time, but once the brain decides on an action it takes about 200 Ms for the signal to propagate to the relevant muscles.

indescions_2017 9y ago

OOTH, altering the source to remove any human dexterity limits and watching subsequent AI vs AI battles play out at 60fps would be really fun to spectate ;)

scj 9y ago
For SC1 BW, you can already watch https://www.youtube.com/user/certicky https://www.youtube.com/user/certicky for a weekly highlights broadcast / commentary of AIs. Right now there is an AI arms race where the previously dominant AI (Iron Bot) is being beaten by challengers. It used to happen when Iron Bot did something silly. Now it is happening because the competitors have really stepped up their game. The current board leader (krasi0) has a strategy similar to their predecessor (Terran Mechanical units: Tanks, Goliaths and Vultures). The alternative strategy I really enjoy watching is a Mutalisk heavy build by Arrakhammer. The bots have styles and differing capabilities. tscmoo is one of the more fascinating ones to watch in this regard, as they mix it up better than anyone else (and tscmoop, the Protoss variation has the best High Templar storm going). The AI APMs get into the 10k ranges at times. Watching the minimap can be like watching insects swarm. If you want to see a game between two AIs in progress, you can watch: https://www.twitch.tv/sscait https://www.twitch.tv/sscait While these AIs can pull off tactics a human player could not (what they can do with Vultures is incredible), at this point they wouldn't be able to compete with the professionals. Going back to an earlier example, I think I could use High Templars more effectively than any AI I've watched.
- sanderjd 9y ago
  This surprises me - I would have expected the computer mechanics to be much better than what a human can achieve. Do you have insight into why that isn't true?
  - lifeformed 9y ago
    AIs can click faster, but humans still have better overall strategy and planning, which matters a lot in this game.
  - 9y ago

metachris 9y ago

Which is still about 350 actions per minute for a professional SC2 player, roughly 5 to 6 actions per second.

ktwo 9y ago

IMO there should also be a precision limit. The timing of actions should include human-typical jitter and the wrong action should sometimes be activated to simulate misclicks/fat-finger keypresses — e.g., messing up a control group by assinging a unit to the wrong number key. The bot must also not be able to act faster than human reaction times (~250ms), this could be enforced by adding a fixed delay to the observations. I wouldn't be surprised if human Starcraft II play isn't so much limited by decision-making as by the translation of decisions into mechanical actions, which in turn dilutes the attention devoted to actual decision making.

branja 9y ago
ideally they'd train it on real keypresses rather than actions
- mulmen 9y ago
  Why would that be ideal? Wouldn't that just make ML at the strategy layer harder without doing anything to make the discoveries more valuable?
  - branja 9y ago
    to emulate human handicaps at the interface layer. I didn't say it would be free
    - mulmen 9y ago
      But why is that desirable? Why would we want to emulate the human physical handicaps in our quest to advance AI at a strategy level?
      - branja 9y ago
        For the same reason the APM are limited: to ensure that what we are doing is really focusing on advancing strategy rather than brute mechanical skill. If I played against an AI using nothing but the rendered frames and sound of a game as input, I might not even make the stipulation on reflexes. I'd be humbled if I lost. As it stands now, most of the games I like have bad AI. Sure, it can be fun to play a hack and slash against lots of little, dumb minions, but FPS, RTS AI these days still don't cut it as savvy opponents. Often they have inhuman perception, direct knowledge of game state, or higher starting resources, but they make abysmal decisions. Yes, I realize these are unlikely, expensive goals and incremental progress is how things are done. I just want to know if it's possible or desirable to emulate actual human reaction time. Do you disagree this would in principle help separate strategy from godlike reflexes?

popcorncolonel 9y ago

Why not first allow the AI to have unlimited APM and beat humans, then restrict it later? Because I don't think we're even close to the easier problem.

aerovistae 9y ago
In what universe is taking 10,000 actions per minute an easier problem for a neural net than 100 such actions?
- sidusknight 9y ago
  Have you played SC2 before? It's hard to explain if you haven't.
  - aerovistae 9y ago
    Yes, I have.
- kbart 9y ago
  "In what universe is taking 10,000 actions per minute an easier problem for a neural net than 100 such actions?" StarCraft is precisely such universe. If you could micromanage units perfectly, you can do some amazing tricks. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs
  - SmallDeadGuy 9y ago
    I'm imagining an AI war where the next advancement is the micro of the siege engines to optimise targets and timing of shots to hit large groups after the initial splash avoidance. AI on both sides keep trying to maintain a one-step-ahead strategy which minimises/maximises casualties based on predicting the exact shooting/dodging strategy of the opponents. Will be interesting to follow developments in this area!
  - aerovistae 9y ago

jtraffic 9y ago

Philosophically, I wonder if it's better to just acknowledge the differences between AI and humans, and let them play to their strengths. It seems common to think that we need to constrain AI in certain ways to be more like humans, but the constraints are always artificial. APM is one constraint, but what about working memory? What about multithreading? We already allow the AI access to computational resources humans don't have. Why draw that line at APM, exactly?

themacguffinman 9y ago
I don't think they're constraining APM to make the AI more human-like. It seems more like they're controlling a variable, so that if the AI wins, they know it wasn't just because the AI could out-click a human.

JabavuAdams 9y ago

Currently, though, APM isn't a real advantage for AIs. They're still too stupid.