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I was impressed with DeepMind's work on Go and Chess. It seemed to truly grasp the strategy and "understand" the games better than any human, which is in stark

I was impressed with DeepMind's work on Go and Chess. It seemed to truly grasp the strategy and "understand" the games better than any human, which is in stark contrast to previous engines that relied on brute-force tactical brilliance. AlphaStar plays like I'd expect a computer to play. It makes some very stupid decisions that suggest a lack of real "understanding" or strategic thinking, such as its wacky unit compositions, the packs of five observers moving around together, and its miserable response to the immortal drop in the last game. It won through superhuman multitasking and micro, which is where I'd expect it to shine. AlphaStar is, in some respects, awful at SC2.

red75prime 8y ago
We tend to think in hierarchical terms: tactics, strategy, and the like. It allows us to quickly create imperfect viable solutions. AlphaStar is probably lacking such distinction and sees the game as a sequence of actions. So it takes a lot more time for it to learn behavior patterns that we call strategy. I think after training for maybe 20 thousand in-game years it will have decent strategy, while still lacking a real "understanding" of what a strategy is. We probably will not see humanlike learning speed and adaptability before development of methods for learning hierarchical representations.