7 ms·

yeah I was disappointed to discover it worked this way. don't get me wrong, it's a major accomplishment in AI regardless, but it's a significant advantage and

yeah I was disappointed to discover it worked this way. don't get me wrong, it's a major accomplishment in AI regardless, but it's a significant advantage and it would be easier for me to appreciate the AI's skill if I didn't have to keep reminding myself that it can see the whole map at once. it's such an information advantage.

shawnz 8y ago
It sounds to me like, although it could see the whole map at once, the fog of war was still applied. So the bot really just got as much information as the minimap would normally give a human player. > it could observe the attributes of its own and its opponent’s _visible units_ on the map directly
- aerovistae 8y ago
  No, not true. Just had an extended argument with a friend over this. Here are some of my arguments against what you're saying: 1. While it's true that a human player could see everything the AI is seeing, the human player has to spend time and clicks to go see those things, whereas the AI sees it all simultaneously without having to use any actions or spend any time to take it in. 2. Emphasis on the computer seeing it all simultaneously. The computer can see the state of two health bars on opposite sides of the map at the same time, or 100 healthbars in a hundred places at a time. A human cannot do that, and even trying to move the view around fast enough to do so would render it impossible to actually do anything else. 3. If it's true that seeing more at once is not advantageous, then it must also be true that seeing less at once is not disadvantageous. So by that reasoning a player playing on a 1 inch x 1 inch screen would not have any disadvantage, since after all they're getting just the same amount of information as long as they move the screen around enough! Reducto ad absurdum, a player with a 1 pixel x 1 pixel screen has no disadvantage either, because they have access to the same information as long as they move around quick enough. It quickly becomes evident that smaller screens inhibit your knowledge of the game state, and therefore larger screen benefit your knowledge of the game state.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    This is why a lot of competitive games have rightly decided not to support ultrawide monitors. Being able to observe more of the game map simultaneously is a huge advantage. The only fair way to support them would be to cripple the player, by cutting off the top and bottom of the viewable range, not by extending the left and right range.
  - gknoy 8y ago
    One thing they said early on in the ~2 hour video I was watching was that, while AlphaStar had access to the full data of everything within its fog of war, it seemed to need to partition its access to it, in a way that was similar to a human checking different screens, and did so about ~30 (or was it 37?) times per minute. This might be why changing to having to observe only one screenful at a time (rather than the zoomed out view) didn't seem to have as large an effect.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    This sounds like a real advantage in the AI's favor though: It can focus its attention on a lot more things simultaneously. It's not just a UI difference; the AI is actually better at this, like how a pocket calculator is actually better at division than people. This latter bit we just accept; we don't defend humans by saying the calculator is cheating because it isn't writing out the calculation by hand. Similarly, robots are physically stronger than people at any given task you can think of. That's a real advantage of them.
    - graedus 8y ago
      It is certainly a real advantage, but I think the argument is that it's not as interesting as an AI that could win on the strength of better decision-making, or the innovation of novel strategies, etc.
      - CydeWeys 8y ago
        AI wins on the strength of better decision-making and novel strategies in Chess and Go, though. I have no doubt we'll see this in RTSes in the near future as well. For now we may not be quite there yet, as this is simply the first time it's beaten a pro player in any way. Compare with the AlphaGo match vs Fan Hui. A year later and it was dominant over all pro players.
tanilama 8y ago
Actually, I would say this might be the strength of AI from another perspective: the ability to observe and monitor global information without losing attention. Or in other words, attend to the whole picture from get go without being overwhelmed. While it is an unfair advantage in competitive gaming, but in more realistic settings, there is no requirement that AI needs to have only 2 eyes. It can have as many as it could handle, while human can't scale the same way.
- hughzhang 8y ago
  While that would be amazing if true, I'm pretty sure if you take away the stalker blink micro AlphaStar loses hands down to humans. This isn't taking away from Deepmind's victory at all, but I think micro was what made the AI come out ahead in this one. In many of the games, Mana had much better macro only to lose to blink stalkers.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    You play the game as it's written. Come back with another version of StarCraft that isn't so micro-intensive and we can see how the AI does on that. Chess and Go don't have any form of micro and AIs are nevertheless dominant there. I'd say, give AI development another year and I wouldn't expect there to be any kind of game, in any genre, that humans can beat AIs at. Whether it's Chess, Go, other classical board games, Civilization, MOBAs, RTSes, FPSs, etc.
    - celeritascelery 8y ago
      > Chess and Go don't have any form of micro and AIs are nevertheless dominant there. Yes, but chess and go have a tiny problem space compared to something like Starcraft. People want to see an AI win because it’s smart, not because it’s a computer capable of things impossible for humans. If the goal was perfect micro they could write computer programs to do that 10 years ago.
      - CydeWeys 8y ago
alexbeloi 8y ago
You'll likely be happy to hear that this has been (is being) addressed. I watched the live broadcast of this announcement where they did a recap of all 10 previous matches (against TLO and Mana) and they talked about this concern. During today's announcement they presented a new model that could not see the whole map and had to use the camera movement to focus properly. The deepmind team said it took somewhat longer to train but they were able to achieve the same levels of performance according to their metrics and play-testing against previous version. However... They did a live match vs LiquidMana (6th match against Mana) against the latest version (with camera movement) and LiquidMana won! LiquidMana was able to repeatedly do hit-and-run immortal drop harassment in AlphaStar's base, forcing it to bring troops back to defend its base, causing it to fall behind in production and supply over time and ultimately lose a major battle.

shawnz 8y ago

It sounds to me like, although it could see the whole map at once, the fog of war was still applied. So the bot really just got as much information as the minimap would normally give a human player. > it could observe the attributes of its own and its opponent’s _visible units_ on the map directly

aerovistae 8y ago
No, not true. Just had an extended argument with a friend over this. Here are some of my arguments against what you're saying: 1. While it's true that a human player could see everything the AI is seeing, the human player has to spend time and clicks to go see those things, whereas the AI sees it all simultaneously without having to use any actions or spend any time to take it in. 2. Emphasis on the computer seeing it all simultaneously. The computer can see the state of two health bars on opposite sides of the map at the same time, or 100 healthbars in a hundred places at a time. A human cannot do that, and even trying to move the view around fast enough to do so would render it impossible to actually do anything else. 3. If it's true that seeing more at once is not advantageous, then it must also be true that seeing less at once is not disadvantageous. So by that reasoning a player playing on a 1 inch x 1 inch screen would not have any disadvantage, since after all they're getting just the same amount of information as long as they move the screen around enough! Reducto ad absurdum, a player with a 1 pixel x 1 pixel screen has no disadvantage either, because they have access to the same information as long as they move around quick enough. It quickly becomes evident that smaller screens inhibit your knowledge of the game state, and therefore larger screen benefit your knowledge of the game state.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  This is why a lot of competitive games have rightly decided not to support ultrawide monitors. Being able to observe more of the game map simultaneously is a huge advantage. The only fair way to support them would be to cripple the player, by cutting off the top and bottom of the viewable range, not by extending the left and right range.
- gknoy 8y ago
  One thing they said early on in the ~2 hour video I was watching was that, while AlphaStar had access to the full data of everything within its fog of war, it seemed to need to partition its access to it, in a way that was similar to a human checking different screens, and did so about ~30 (or was it 37?) times per minute. This might be why changing to having to observe only one screenful at a time (rather than the zoomed out view) didn't seem to have as large an effect.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  This sounds like a real advantage in the AI's favor though: It can focus its attention on a lot more things simultaneously. It's not just a UI difference; the AI is actually better at this, like how a pocket calculator is actually better at division than people. This latter bit we just accept; we don't defend humans by saying the calculator is cheating because it isn't writing out the calculation by hand. Similarly, robots are physically stronger than people at any given task you can think of. That's a real advantage of them.
  - graedus 8y ago
    It is certainly a real advantage, but I think the argument is that it's not as interesting as an AI that could win on the strength of better decision-making, or the innovation of novel strategies, etc.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      AI wins on the strength of better decision-making and novel strategies in Chess and Go, though. I have no doubt we'll see this in RTSes in the near future as well. For now we may not be quite there yet, as this is simply the first time it's beaten a pro player in any way. Compare with the AlphaGo match vs Fan Hui. A year later and it was dominant over all pro players.

tanilama 8y ago

Actually, I would say this might be the strength of AI from another perspective: the ability to observe and monitor global information without losing attention. Or in other words, attend to the whole picture from get go without being overwhelmed. While it is an unfair advantage in competitive gaming, but in more realistic settings, there is no requirement that AI needs to have only 2 eyes. It can have as many as it could handle, while human can't scale the same way.

hughzhang 8y ago
While that would be amazing if true, I'm pretty sure if you take away the stalker blink micro AlphaStar loses hands down to humans. This isn't taking away from Deepmind's victory at all, but I think micro was what made the AI come out ahead in this one. In many of the games, Mana had much better macro only to lose to blink stalkers.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  You play the game as it's written. Come back with another version of StarCraft that isn't so micro-intensive and we can see how the AI does on that. Chess and Go don't have any form of micro and AIs are nevertheless dominant there. I'd say, give AI development another year and I wouldn't expect there to be any kind of game, in any genre, that humans can beat AIs at. Whether it's Chess, Go, other classical board games, Civilization, MOBAs, RTSes, FPSs, etc.
  - celeritascelery 8y ago
    > Chess and Go don't have any form of micro and AIs are nevertheless dominant there. Yes, but chess and go have a tiny problem space compared to something like Starcraft. People want to see an AI win because it’s smart, not because it’s a computer capable of things impossible for humans. If the goal was perfect micro they could write computer programs to do that 10 years ago.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago

alexbeloi 8y ago

You'll likely be happy to hear that this has been (is being) addressed. I watched the live broadcast of this announcement where they did a recap of all 10 previous matches (against TLO and Mana) and they talked about this concern. During today's announcement they presented a new model that could not see the whole map and had to use the camera movement to focus properly. The deepmind team said it took somewhat longer to train but they were able to achieve the same levels of performance according to their metrics and play-testing against previous version. However... They did a live match vs LiquidMana (6th match against Mana) against the latest version (with camera movement) and LiquidMana won! LiquidMana was able to repeatedly do hit-and-run immortal drop harassment in AlphaStar's base, forcing it to bring troops back to defend its base, causing it to fall behind in production and supply over time and ultimately lose a major battle.