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And they would have won none at all if deepmind had worked on the problem for one more year before showcasing it, even with this limitation. I don’t think it re

And they would have won none at all if deepmind had worked on the problem for one more year before showcasing it, even with this limitation. I don’t think it really matters.

s_m_t 8y ago
Not having to move the camera around is massive. High level starcraft has been likened to something like poker by many pros. Except, instead of getting a steady trickle of information in terms of the cards being put down you have control over what information you gather. But the information is spread out across space and time and the viewport only gives you a small slice. And the human eye only lets you look at a small portion of the screen as well. If you check your minerals, gas, and supply, you cannot be checking your minimap at the same time. Alpha starcraft can look at the minimap constantly while knowing the position and health of every single unit not in the fog of war. For human players maintaining this map awareness is definitely the hardest part of starcraft. The micro isn't really that hard, you can train on special custom maps and get most of the tricks down pretty quickly. The build orders and meta level strategies aren't very hard to wrap your head around either, the possibility space is actually pretty small here. What is hard is constantly task switching, not hyper focusing on a couple of units, knowing what you should be focusing on at any given point in time... Well, those are all pretty much the same, it is, "how should I spend my very limited attention". If your opponent has infinite attention resources some strategies that work against humans dont really make sense. Drops for instance are balanced around the idea that if the opponent recognizes that they are being dropped they will be able to pretty easily defend against it. Against a computer that will instantly see the drop the millisecond it comes out of the fog of war... Well, you just gave away the hard part for free. A human player would either have to a) get lucky and happen to glance at the minimap in the small window to counter the drop. or b) anticipate the drop and make the conscious choice to spend precious attention rescources to catch it.
- gwern 8y ago
  > Not having to move the camera around is massive. If it's so massive, why did their camera-limited agent have near-parity against their non-camera-limited agents?
  - s_m_t 8y ago
    I thought the camera limited match was the only one it lost? Once alphastar was faced with a scenario that couldn't be brute forced with perfect micro it pretty much stopped working.
    - the8472 8y ago
      Internally it played thousands of training games and performed en par to the non-limited agents.[0] A far bigger factor is that this new agent simply trained for fewer days because they only implemented it recently and it was hot out of the oven. Give it another week of training and it would probably be a hard nut to crack again. That said, the matches are played in a manner that gives the humans little time to look for idiosyncratic AI behavior that's exploitable. If they played several dozens of matches against the same set of 5 agents again and again they would probably figure out some cheesy strategy that the AI doesn't know to defend against. We're not yet at the point where the AI can adapt to counter-adaptions in realtime. [0] https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-live-cms/images/SCII-BlogPost-Fig10_02.width-1500.png https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-live-cms/images/SCII...
      - rightbyte 8y ago
        The Dota bot was easy to exploit after some game against it to figure it out for example.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    Overfitting maybe. The show off game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs&t=2h31m22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs&t=2h31m22s The bot is getting it's main force lured back to it's base by hit and runs for it's resource producers. Repeating the same mistake again and again. Later it acts confused and rather have it's main base wrecked than having a high risk fight with it's main force vs the players main force, even though it would auto-lose not doing so. I've got a feeling these bots have a huge API advantage in "mechanical" skills versus humans. Eg. it has to be way faster to retrieve the "x ability used by y" event than seeing an animation unfold on the screen, leaking intention to bots earlier then human players.

And they would have won none at all if deepmind had worked on the problem for one more year before showcasing it, even with this limitation. I don’t think it really matters.

s_m_t 8y ago

Not having to move the camera around is massive. High level starcraft has been likened to something like poker by many pros. Except, instead of getting a steady trickle of information in terms of the cards being put down you have control over what information you gather. But the information is spread out across space and time and the viewport only gives you a small slice. And the human eye only lets you look at a small portion of the screen as well. If you check your minerals, gas, and supply, you cannot be checking your minimap at the same time. Alpha starcraft can look at the minimap constantly while knowing the position and health of every single unit not in the fog of war. For human players maintaining this map awareness is definitely the hardest part of starcraft. The micro isn't really that hard, you can train on special custom maps and get most of the tricks down pretty quickly. The build orders and meta level strategies aren't very hard to wrap your head around either, the possibility space is actually pretty small here. What is hard is constantly task switching, not hyper focusing on a couple of units, knowing what you should be focusing on at any given point in time... Well, those are all pretty much the same, it is, "how should I spend my very limited attention". If your opponent has infinite attention resources some strategies that work against humans dont really make sense. Drops for instance are balanced around the idea that if the opponent recognizes that they are being dropped they will be able to pretty easily defend against it. Against a computer that will instantly see the drop the millisecond it comes out of the fog of war... Well, you just gave away the hard part for free. A human player would either have to a) get lucky and happen to glance at the minimap in the small window to counter the drop. or b) anticipate the drop and make the conscious choice to spend precious attention rescources to catch it.

gwern 8y ago
> Not having to move the camera around is massive. If it's so massive, why did their camera-limited agent have near-parity against their non-camera-limited agents?
- s_m_t 8y ago
  I thought the camera limited match was the only one it lost? Once alphastar was faced with a scenario that couldn't be brute forced with perfect micro it pretty much stopped working.
  - the8472 8y ago
    Internally it played thousands of training games and performed en par to the non-limited agents.[0] A far bigger factor is that this new agent simply trained for fewer days because they only implemented it recently and it was hot out of the oven. Give it another week of training and it would probably be a hard nut to crack again. That said, the matches are played in a manner that gives the humans little time to look for idiosyncratic AI behavior that's exploitable. If they played several dozens of matches against the same set of 5 agents again and again they would probably figure out some cheesy strategy that the AI doesn't know to defend against. We're not yet at the point where the AI can adapt to counter-adaptions in realtime. [0] https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-live-cms/images/SCII-BlogPost-Fig10_02.width-1500.png https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-live-cms/images/SCII...
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      The Dota bot was easy to exploit after some game against it to figure it out for example.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  Overfitting maybe. The show off game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs&t=2h31m22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs&t=2h31m22s The bot is getting it's main force lured back to it's base by hit and runs for it's resource producers. Repeating the same mistake again and again. Later it acts confused and rather have it's main base wrecked than having a high risk fight with it's main force vs the players main force, even though it would auto-lose not doing so. I've got a feeling these bots have a huge API advantage in "mechanical" skills versus humans. Eg. it has to be way faster to retrieve the "x ability used by y" event than seeing an animation unfold on the screen, leaking intention to bots earlier then human players.