4 ms·

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".
  - shawnz 8y ago
    Can't you click on the minimap to move the camera instantly anywhere on the map? EDIT: I guess you would still have to wait for the next frame to get rendered, which could add up. True, that does change things a bit, but of course a computer could still do that way faster than a human.
    - ygra 8y ago
      They noted that the agent used around 30 viewport changes per minute, about the same as human players.

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".
- shawnz 8y ago
  Can't you click on the minimap to move the camera instantly anywhere on the map? EDIT: I guess you would still have to wait for the next frame to get rendered, which could add up. True, that does change things a bit, but of course a computer could still do that way faster than a human.
  - ygra 8y ago
    They noted that the agent used around 30 viewport changes per minute, about the same as human players.