4 ms·

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

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.
    - graedus 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. Yes, likely! I wasn't doubting it's possible or even likely. Only that seeing an AI do flawless 1000 APM stalker micro and macroing perfectly, while pretty cool, is not as exciting as seeing an AI use a novel strategy (edit: especially one that a human could theoretically execute)
shawnz 8y ago
> whereas the AI sees it all simultaneously without having to use any actions or spend any time to take it in. Starcraft is a single-threaded game, so I would think that the AI ultimately still has to enumerate through each visible unit one-by-one to collect their information. Why is that so much different than enumerating through each visible screen and then enumerating through each unit on that screen? Either way, the AI could do it much faster than a human, whether it had to click through the screens manually or not. How would it be possible to eliminate this advantage? It seems to me that it's just part of the nature of AI.
- celeritascelery 8y ago
  You can eliminate that advantage by letting the AI only see the unit information for things on screen, like they did in the last game.
  - shawnz 8y ago
    No, that doesn't eliminate the advantage -- that's what I'm trying to say. Even if you make the AI move the screen around manually and only let it enumerate units that are on-screen, that's still going to take roughly as long as just enumerating through all the units on the map in one go. It's just a matter of executing "foreach all_units" versus "foreach screens { foreach units_on_screen }". In either case a computer could do that much faster than a human. Let me put it the opposite way: If you gave the human player a real time list of every visible unit on the map and all of their information, such that they didn't have to move the screen around manually and could see everything at a glance just like AlphaStar can, would that take the advantage away from AlphaStar? No, it wouldn't because AlphaStar could still go through all that data much faster than any human ever could -- no matter how it's formatted or what you have to do to access it. To AlphaStar, checking all the visible screens is just as much work as scrolling through a list of units.
    - celeritascelery 8y ago
      I get what your saying. But screen movement is rate limited (meaning you can't loop through all possible screen positions in 1ms) so you have to actively choose where you want to focus, just like a human player. Think of it more like calls to a web server then "foreach screens".

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.
  - graedus 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. Yes, likely! I wasn't doubting it's possible or even likely. Only that seeing an AI do flawless 1000 APM stalker micro and macroing perfectly, while pretty cool, is not as exciting as seeing an AI use a novel strategy (edit: especially one that a human could theoretically execute)

shawnz 8y ago

> whereas the AI sees it all simultaneously without having to use any actions or spend any time to take it in. Starcraft is a single-threaded game, so I would think that the AI ultimately still has to enumerate through each visible unit one-by-one to collect their information. Why is that so much different than enumerating through each visible screen and then enumerating through each unit on that screen? Either way, the AI could do it much faster than a human, whether it had to click through the screens manually or not. How would it be possible to eliminate this advantage? It seems to me that it's just part of the nature of AI.

celeritascelery 8y ago
You can eliminate that advantage by letting the AI only see the unit information for things on screen, like they did in the last game.
- shawnz 8y ago
  No, that doesn't eliminate the advantage -- that's what I'm trying to say. Even if you make the AI move the screen around manually and only let it enumerate units that are on-screen, that's still going to take roughly as long as just enumerating through all the units on the map in one go. It's just a matter of executing "foreach all_units" versus "foreach screens { foreach units_on_screen }". In either case a computer could do that much faster than a human. Let me put it the opposite way: If you gave the human player a real time list of every visible unit on the map and all of their information, such that they didn't have to move the screen around manually and could see everything at a glance just like AlphaStar can, would that take the advantage away from AlphaStar? No, it wouldn't because AlphaStar could still go through all that data much faster than any human ever could -- no matter how it's formatted or what you have to do to access it. To AlphaStar, checking all the visible screens is just as much work as scrolling through a list of units.
  - celeritascelery 8y ago
    I get what your saying. But screen movement is rate limited (meaning you can't loop through all possible screen positions in 1ms) so you have to actively choose where you want to focus, just like a human player. Think of it more like calls to a web server then "foreach screens".