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Is a AI that wins at Starcraft only because it has crazy high APM really going to help get to the next X? We could have built that 10 years ago. All it proves i

Is a AI that wins at Starcraft only because it has crazy high APM really going to help get to the next X? We could have built that 10 years ago. All it proves is that computers have faster reflexes then humans. That won’t help them become problem solvers for the future.

CydeWeys 8y ago
Speed of play is a fundamentally important gameplay mechanic of any real-time game. One of the main reasons the pros are better than amateurs at these types of game is because they play and react faster. And yes, of course computers are much better at doing things more quickly than humans. It's not even remotely close for us. The AIs are clearly better. It's not cheating either; they are legitimately better at it than us. It sounds like you're simply objecting to pitting people up against computers in real-time games entirely.
- celeritascelery 8y ago
  So all they really proved is computers are faster then humans. I knew that before this started. The Deepmind team knows the challenge isn’t to beat humans at Starcraft. That is trivially easy with the advantages you mentioned. The challenge is to be better at strategy then a human. That is why they tried to add artificial rules to make the AI have similar physical limitations to a human (emulated mouse, rate limited actions, emulated screen and visibility). There have been micro AI bots for years that could out preform any human. They knew they weren’t just trying to build another micro bot, because if they were it wouldn’t be much of an accomplishment.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    > The Deepmind team knows the challenge isn’t to beat humans at Starcraft. That is trivially easy with the advantages you mentioned. It's not trivially easy at all. No one had come close before. It took an entire team of ML experts at Google to pull it off. These hard-coded micro bots you're referring to didn't holistically play the entire game and win at it. They're more akin to an aimbot in FPSes, not a self-learning general game-playing AI. This is yet another in a long string of impressive AI achievements being minimized through moving the goalposts. It's facile and it's boring.
- orbital-decay 8y ago
  >It's not cheating either; they are legitimately better at it than us. This is not 100% true, the AI still skips the mechanical part (it doesn't have a mouse, keyboard and hands) in this particular case. This alone can introduce insane amounts of additional complexity, and will make AI to not be pixel precise.
bsaul 8y ago
You seem to forget the way it learned to play every part of the game (not just micro fights). That is, not by having any developer code any rules, but simply by "looking" and "playing". That's the great accomplishment and nothing like that could have been done 10 years ago.
- celeritascelery 8y ago
  What makes this interesting is if they can make a computer program better at Starcraft strategy then a human. How they did that is irrelevant. If having developers code rules makes a better AI then deep learning, then the former is the most impressive solution. What they did is a great accomplishment and the AI they created was amazing, but I feel like the faster-then-humanly-possible micro makes any accomplishment hollow, because that is really nothing new.
  - taneq 8y ago
    > How they did that is irrelevant. Emphatically not. If they beat human performance in this (non-AI-building) field by humans painstakingly coding rules for specific situations, then that's cool I guess but not groundbreaking, because the solution doesn't generalise. If they beat human performance in a field heretofore intractable by software by throwing the basic rules and a ton of compute at an algorithm and then waiting for six weeks while the algorithm figures the rest out by itself, then that absolutely is qualitatively different. The reason being, of course, that if they can find an algorithm that works like this across a wide enough problem space then eventually they'll find an algorithm which will work on the question of "build a better algorithm." After which, as we know, all bets are off.
  - sam_dusk 8y ago
    If you think the how is irrelevant you are completely missing the point of this exercise. Maybe to you only the result matters but for every other task and humanity the how matters. Simply imagine next taking on a different Game like one version of the Anno series. If developers did it by hand, you need 50 devs sitting there for probably a couple of months, figuring out the best, rules their sequence and putting them in. That is about $20 Million just to get a similar AI for the next game. Compare that to download all available replays, requiring maybe 2-3 data scientist to get the data into shape, renting some compute in the google cloud and you get the same or a better result for probably half a million $. Watch and learn from data alone is why modern machine learning is considered a revolution and novelty. Buying compute time in the cloud is in comparison (to devs and hand coding) dirt cheap and the results are often better. Deepmind is not working on this problem for the benefit of gamers or the Starcraft community. Making the perfect bot is not the aim. Tackling the next hurdle, next hardest problem in machine learning is. On the way to become better at generalizing the learning algorithms.
tux1968 8y ago
The APM of AlphaStar was about half of the professional player in this match. Check out: https://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs?t=3189 https://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs?t=3189
- Narishma 8y ago
  But when it counts, such as during micro-heavy battles, it's much faster and more precise than a human.
  - fernandotakai 8y ago
    yup. you could have 200 apm, but as long as your clicks and button presses are perfect, you are going to win against someone with 800 but is super imprecise. blink stalkers are basically perfect for an AI because of the precision they can blink them around.

CydeWeys 8y ago

Speed of play is a fundamentally important gameplay mechanic of any real-time game. One of the main reasons the pros are better than amateurs at these types of game is because they play and react faster. And yes, of course computers are much better at doing things more quickly than humans. It's not even remotely close for us. The AIs are clearly better. It's not cheating either; they are legitimately better at it than us. It sounds like you're simply objecting to pitting people up against computers in real-time games entirely.

celeritascelery 8y ago
So all they really proved is computers are faster then humans. I knew that before this started. The Deepmind team knows the challenge isn’t to beat humans at Starcraft. That is trivially easy with the advantages you mentioned. The challenge is to be better at strategy then a human. That is why they tried to add artificial rules to make the AI have similar physical limitations to a human (emulated mouse, rate limited actions, emulated screen and visibility). There have been micro AI bots for years that could out preform any human. They knew they weren’t just trying to build another micro bot, because if they were it wouldn’t be much of an accomplishment.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  > The Deepmind team knows the challenge isn’t to beat humans at Starcraft. That is trivially easy with the advantages you mentioned. It's not trivially easy at all. No one had come close before. It took an entire team of ML experts at Google to pull it off. These hard-coded micro bots you're referring to didn't holistically play the entire game and win at it. They're more akin to an aimbot in FPSes, not a self-learning general game-playing AI. This is yet another in a long string of impressive AI achievements being minimized through moving the goalposts. It's facile and it's boring.
orbital-decay 8y ago
>It's not cheating either; they are legitimately better at it than us. This is not 100% true, the AI still skips the mechanical part (it doesn't have a mouse, keyboard and hands) in this particular case. This alone can introduce insane amounts of additional complexity, and will make AI to not be pixel precise.

bsaul 8y ago

You seem to forget the way it learned to play every part of the game (not just micro fights). That is, not by having any developer code any rules, but simply by "looking" and "playing". That's the great accomplishment and nothing like that could have been done 10 years ago.

celeritascelery 8y ago
What makes this interesting is if they can make a computer program better at Starcraft strategy then a human. How they did that is irrelevant. If having developers code rules makes a better AI then deep learning, then the former is the most impressive solution. What they did is a great accomplishment and the AI they created was amazing, but I feel like the faster-then-humanly-possible micro makes any accomplishment hollow, because that is really nothing new.
- taneq 8y ago
  > How they did that is irrelevant. Emphatically not. If they beat human performance in this (non-AI-building) field by humans painstakingly coding rules for specific situations, then that's cool I guess but not groundbreaking, because the solution doesn't generalise. If they beat human performance in a field heretofore intractable by software by throwing the basic rules and a ton of compute at an algorithm and then waiting for six weeks while the algorithm figures the rest out by itself, then that absolutely is qualitatively different. The reason being, of course, that if they can find an algorithm that works like this across a wide enough problem space then eventually they'll find an algorithm which will work on the question of "build a better algorithm." After which, as we know, all bets are off.
- sam_dusk 8y ago
  If you think the how is irrelevant you are completely missing the point of this exercise. Maybe to you only the result matters but for every other task and humanity the how matters. Simply imagine next taking on a different Game like one version of the Anno series. If developers did it by hand, you need 50 devs sitting there for probably a couple of months, figuring out the best, rules their sequence and putting them in. That is about $20 Million just to get a similar AI for the next game. Compare that to download all available replays, requiring maybe 2-3 data scientist to get the data into shape, renting some compute in the google cloud and you get the same or a better result for probably half a million $. Watch and learn from data alone is why modern machine learning is considered a revolution and novelty. Buying compute time in the cloud is in comparison (to devs and hand coding) dirt cheap and the results are often better. Deepmind is not working on this problem for the benefit of gamers or the Starcraft community. Making the perfect bot is not the aim. Tackling the next hurdle, next hardest problem in machine learning is. On the way to become better at generalizing the learning algorithms.

tux1968 8y ago

The APM of AlphaStar was about half of the professional player in this match. Check out: https://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs?t=3189 https://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs?t=3189

Narishma 8y ago
But when it counts, such as during micro-heavy battles, it's much faster and more precise than a human.
- fernandotakai 8y ago
  yup. you could have 200 apm, but as long as your clicks and button presses are perfect, you are going to win against someone with 800 but is super imprecise. blink stalkers are basically perfect for an AI because of the precision they can blink them around.