4 ms·

> How many of those 500 actions are actually useful? Exactly, a human doing 500 APM during intense moments is going to be way different than an AI bursting 100

> How many of those 500 actions are actually useful? Exactly, a human doing 500 APM during intense moments is going to be way different than an AI bursting 1000 APM with pixel-precision during the most crucial moment in a game. TLO spent a ton of time at >1000 APM and walked his army directly into enemy shots all the time. MaNa had much better control at ~400 APM. So APM is really irrelevant to control - for humans. I suspect the AI, on the other hand, makes each action precise & count for something. This graph, which I think was supposed to show that the AI was being "human", IMO is pretty damning. We saw the APM spike to >1000 during a critical moment and we saw the APM at <30 during lulls, so we know it uses its APM at important moments, presumably with important pixel-precise actions. https://deepmind.com/blog/alphastar-mastering-real-time-strategy-game-starcraft-ii/#image-34426 https://deepmind.com/blog/alphastar-mastering-real-time-stra...

CydeWeys 8y ago
I suspect that once the AI becomes good enough it will be able to beat human players using a much lower total APM than human players. We're not quite there yet, but it just needs a little bit of time. As a hopefully illustrative comparison, you could give any top player a day of play time per move against the top Chess AI being given a minute of play time per move and the AI will still win. That's how much better the AIs are than humans now. There's no reason in principle this won't be possible with StarCraft AI too.
- setr 8y ago
  The biggest issue with allowing the ai to have high APM is that it will inevitably learn optimal strategies that depend on that high APM, eg stalkers can take on far more immortals than we normally expect, and the AI will learn it this way, because the high APM allows a new stalker strategy (or rather, empowers an old one greatly) while not affecting immortals significantly. This also naturally means the AI leagues see a different game balance than the human leagues, leading to strategy divergence. And then when you drop the APM limit, suddenly all the learned optimal ai strategies start falling apart, and the whole thing has to be relearned. More annoyingly, there’s not much for human players to learn from innovative ai strategies that are based on inhuman accuracy of play (because we couldn’t possibly execute it).
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    What they're improving at right now isn't any specific AI model, it's how to train the AI models. It's meta-machine learning. I don't doubt that they can quickly train up a new model under different constraints now that they know how best to train up said models. It's not like they throw away all progress once they change some constraints; far from it.
- arcticfox 8y ago
  I'm sure we'll get there too, I just think it's a little deceptive how they've measured the APM at the moment. StarCraft is more random than chess, so I do think it's possible humans will always be able to take occasional games off of fairly constrained AIs just based off blind luck in picking counter builds, it will be interesting to see what % that is.
vertline3 8y ago
Such high actions per minute does not seem fun to me, and possibly a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen.
- dmoy 8y ago
  It is why I stopped playing SC, and I was never any good anyways. Still fun, but it just hurt real bad.
  - Kagerjay 8y ago
    I stopped playing SC competitively because it's too stressful. Both physically and mentally. Hitting 300 APM continously in a game for up to 60 minutes at a time makes your hands go numb. And the adrenaline rush makes you want to go running afterwards. With games like LoL/DoTA at least you have a chance to take a break after a gank/farming/ team wipes. With starcraft every decision has a significantly higher compounding effect
    - dmoy 8y ago
      Hell I never played it competitively. I had to stop playing it even casually because it physically hurt.
- aurelwu 8y ago
  the 1000 apm thing is because of a bug in how apm is calculated in starcraft2. There is a hotkey to assign all your units to a new control group while also deleting it from all other control groups which TLO extensively uses, and while it just is one key-combination to press it records as 1 action per unit which was selected. The real APM of pro players averages at 250-400 and peaks at 600-700.
- gpm 8y ago
  > a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen. Yes, I have one from it and wasn't even playing that high (I averaged less than 100 apm). I understand that it's a common problem.

CydeWeys 8y ago

I suspect that once the AI becomes good enough it will be able to beat human players using a much lower total APM than human players. We're not quite there yet, but it just needs a little bit of time. As a hopefully illustrative comparison, you could give any top player a day of play time per move against the top Chess AI being given a minute of play time per move and the AI will still win. That's how much better the AIs are than humans now. There's no reason in principle this won't be possible with StarCraft AI too.

setr 8y ago
The biggest issue with allowing the ai to have high APM is that it will inevitably learn optimal strategies that depend on that high APM, eg stalkers can take on far more immortals than we normally expect, and the AI will learn it this way, because the high APM allows a new stalker strategy (or rather, empowers an old one greatly) while not affecting immortals significantly. This also naturally means the AI leagues see a different game balance than the human leagues, leading to strategy divergence. And then when you drop the APM limit, suddenly all the learned optimal ai strategies start falling apart, and the whole thing has to be relearned. More annoyingly, there’s not much for human players to learn from innovative ai strategies that are based on inhuman accuracy of play (because we couldn’t possibly execute it).
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  What they're improving at right now isn't any specific AI model, it's how to train the AI models. It's meta-machine learning. I don't doubt that they can quickly train up a new model under different constraints now that they know how best to train up said models. It's not like they throw away all progress once they change some constraints; far from it.
arcticfox 8y ago
I'm sure we'll get there too, I just think it's a little deceptive how they've measured the APM at the moment. StarCraft is more random than chess, so I do think it's possible humans will always be able to take occasional games off of fairly constrained AIs just based off blind luck in picking counter builds, it will be interesting to see what % that is.

vertline3 8y ago

Such high actions per minute does not seem fun to me, and possibly a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen.

dmoy 8y ago
It is why I stopped playing SC, and I was never any good anyways. Still fun, but it just hurt real bad.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  I stopped playing SC competitively because it's too stressful. Both physically and mentally. Hitting 300 APM continously in a game for up to 60 minutes at a time makes your hands go numb. And the adrenaline rush makes you want to go running afterwards. With games like LoL/DoTA at least you have a chance to take a break after a gank/farming/ team wipes. With starcraft every decision has a significantly higher compounding effect
  - dmoy 8y ago
    Hell I never played it competitively. I had to stop playing it even casually because it physically hurt.
aurelwu 8y ago
the 1000 apm thing is because of a bug in how apm is calculated in starcraft2. There is a hotkey to assign all your units to a new control group while also deleting it from all other control groups which TLO extensively uses, and while it just is one key-combination to press it records as 1 action per unit which was selected. The real APM of pro players averages at 250-400 and peaks at 600-700.
gpm 8y ago
> a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen. Yes, I have one from it and wasn't even playing that high (I averaged less than 100 apm). I understand that it's a common problem.