7 ms·

An AI crushed two human pros at StarCraft–but it wasn’t a fair fight

20 points by okket 8y ago

alexc05 8y ago
you want skynet? 'cause that's how you get skynet.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  "But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherf___rs into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink. His name is Connor. John Connor. Your son, Sarah... your unborn son." From the article: "This is what I'm used to seeing when humans battle AIs," Stemkoski said, as Komincz dropped the Immortals in AlphaStar's base for the third time. "You're finding something that they're doing that's a mistake and you're making them do it over, and over, and over." It seems that right now, AI is good at figuring out useful tactics and applying them. It's not so good at seeing when its useful tactics are turned against them. In that way, it's similar to humans.
dragontamer 8y ago
An army of Stalkers should NEVER beat an army of Immortals. Stalkers have 14.4 DPS (vs Armored units) while Immortals have 48.1 DPS (vs Armored units). Both Immortals and Stalkers are armored. Immortals provide more than double DPS, with 200+100 HP / Shields. While Stalkers have only 80+80 HP / shields. Stalkers cost roughly 1/2 of an Immortal, but any "even match" would have roughly 2x Stalkers for every Immortal. Immortals do roughly 3.5x more damage while having 2x the HP (Immortals have a bonus ability to gain +100 Shields as well). Even if outnumbered 2-to-1, Immortals shouldn't lose the fight. The problem is that AlphaStar can watch all of its Stalkers's HP simultaneously, and blink them away from danger instantly. AlphaStar is playing a game that is fundamentally different than what Humans play. In AlphaStar's version of Starcraft, Stalkers win vs Immortals. All you gotta do is Blink away low-HP Stalkers to the back line, and then have the Stalkers regenerate their shields before bringing them back into battle. Its inhuman. Maybe its intelligence, but its an exceptionally poor demonstration of intelligence. --------------- The game that the AI played was not Starcraft, certainly not the game that humans play. Humans cannot physically click quickly enough to move stalkers in the way that AlphaStar did. The screen humans look at cannot show all of the HP of your individual units. The screen humans look at can only see some of the battlefield, not the entire battlefield. That's the main issue with the demonstration. Sure, the APM rules were designed to prevent this situation from happening, but the demonstration proved that the APM-caps were insufficient at creating human-like playing conditions.
- T-hawk 8y ago
  We should establish and recognize as a concept OPM, observations-per-minute. That's what the AI is doing in excess of what the human can, observing the game state faster, even if acting at the same APM.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    APM Accuracy as a concept also needs to be revisited. A human who misclicks a "move" action, will quickly issue a 2nd or 3rd move to move the unit to the correct location. All together, it will count as 5 actions (1-action to click on a unit. 4-actions to move the unit around, because 3 of them were a mistake). This is seen with the 800 APM that TLO played with. He has a lot of spurious clicks and button clicks. The units are controlled well, but a lot of his actions are redundant. (There's no penalty for redundant actions, so why not??) A computer will not misclick. In fact, the AI doesn't even have a mouse: it can accurately click any location on the screen it wants without moving a cursor. Therefore, a computer will have 300-"perfect" APM (no misclicks involved), while a human will have more and more misclicks as their APM goes higher. --------- I dunno, I think going for Starcraft was a fundamental mistake. A huge amount of Starcraft practice is just moving the mouse around and developing finger-dexterity to support 100+ APM (at my level of Starcraft anyway. I never really got over 150 APM even at my best). The dexterity of your wrists and fingers play a huge part in the game. Any game where dexterity, reaction speed, and so forth are an element, computers will likely dominate.
    - ALittleLight 8y ago
      There is the concert of effective actions per minute or eapm. Presumably AlphaStar has a high eapm to apm ratio. https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Actions_per_Minute#APM_vs._eAPM https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Actions_per_Minute#APM_vs._...
    - cwkoss 8y ago
      It would be interesting if they made the AI harness add noise to the click position signal based on how long it has been since the last click. Ex. up to 5 perfectly targeted ClkPS, or up to 10 with 10px accuracy, or up to 15 with 30px accuracy
pacala 8y ago
When a swarm of killer drones comes down your neighborhood, good luck complaining "it wasn't a fair fight".
- dragontamer 8y ago
  We have fully automated homing cruise missiles since the 1980s. That's what modern combat is about these days. That's why guerilla fighters exist: to hide from US Troops because they can't win in a fair fight. They need to use civilians as shields (and there's no AI that can determine friend from foe yet). --------- The Starcraft demo was supposed to be a demonstration of intelligence. Not a demonstration of superior-accuracy and superior-dexterity that machines have. We've known for years that machines can see things at the millisecond level and react faster than us for some time. The AI problems trying to be solved today are "friend vs foe" recognition, strategic decision making, etc. etc. The AlphaGo game managed to demonstrate that. But the AlphaStar games only demonstrated what we already know about computers: Computers can click faster, and more accurately, than humans can.
  - pacala 8y ago
    1 Tomahawk missile = $1,000,000 1 10kg payload drone = $10,000 Bonus: the killer drone can hang around for hours and tell fried from foe via biometric recognition [voice, face, gait], dutifully compiled by your nearby adtech multinational. Finally we can afford genocide on a private budget.

20 points by okket 8y ago

alexc05 8y ago

you want skynet? 'cause that's how you get skynet.

stcredzero 8y ago
"But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherf___rs into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink. His name is Connor. John Connor. Your son, Sarah... your unborn son." From the article: "This is what I'm used to seeing when humans battle AIs," Stemkoski said, as Komincz dropped the Immortals in AlphaStar's base for the third time. "You're finding something that they're doing that's a mistake and you're making them do it over, and over, and over." It seems that right now, AI is good at figuring out useful tactics and applying them. It's not so good at seeing when its useful tactics are turned against them. In that way, it's similar to humans.

dragontamer 8y ago

An army of Stalkers should NEVER beat an army of Immortals. Stalkers have 14.4 DPS (vs Armored units) while Immortals have 48.1 DPS (vs Armored units). Both Immortals and Stalkers are armored. Immortals provide more than double DPS, with 200+100 HP / Shields. While Stalkers have only 80+80 HP / shields. Stalkers cost roughly 1/2 of an Immortal, but any "even match" would have roughly 2x Stalkers for every Immortal. Immortals do roughly 3.5x more damage while having 2x the HP (Immortals have a bonus ability to gain +100 Shields as well). Even if outnumbered 2-to-1, Immortals shouldn't lose the fight. The problem is that AlphaStar can watch all of its Stalkers's HP simultaneously, and blink them away from danger instantly. AlphaStar is playing a game that is fundamentally different than what Humans play. In AlphaStar's version of Starcraft, Stalkers win vs Immortals. All you gotta do is Blink away low-HP Stalkers to the back line, and then have the Stalkers regenerate their shields before bringing them back into battle. Its inhuman. Maybe its intelligence, but its an exceptionally poor demonstration of intelligence. --------------- The game that the AI played was not Starcraft, certainly not the game that humans play. Humans cannot physically click quickly enough to move stalkers in the way that AlphaStar did. The screen humans look at cannot show all of the HP of your individual units. The screen humans look at can only see some of the battlefield, not the entire battlefield. That's the main issue with the demonstration. Sure, the APM rules were designed to prevent this situation from happening, but the demonstration proved that the APM-caps were insufficient at creating human-like playing conditions.

T-hawk 8y ago
We should establish and recognize as a concept OPM, observations-per-minute. That's what the AI is doing in excess of what the human can, observing the game state faster, even if acting at the same APM.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  APM Accuracy as a concept also needs to be revisited. A human who misclicks a "move" action, will quickly issue a 2nd or 3rd move to move the unit to the correct location. All together, it will count as 5 actions (1-action to click on a unit. 4-actions to move the unit around, because 3 of them were a mistake). This is seen with the 800 APM that TLO played with. He has a lot of spurious clicks and button clicks. The units are controlled well, but a lot of his actions are redundant. (There's no penalty for redundant actions, so why not??) A computer will not misclick. In fact, the AI doesn't even have a mouse: it can accurately click any location on the screen it wants without moving a cursor. Therefore, a computer will have 300-"perfect" APM (no misclicks involved), while a human will have more and more misclicks as their APM goes higher. --------- I dunno, I think going for Starcraft was a fundamental mistake. A huge amount of Starcraft practice is just moving the mouse around and developing finger-dexterity to support 100+ APM (at my level of Starcraft anyway. I never really got over 150 APM even at my best). The dexterity of your wrists and fingers play a huge part in the game. Any game where dexterity, reaction speed, and so forth are an element, computers will likely dominate.
  - ALittleLight 8y ago
    There is the concert of effective actions per minute or eapm. Presumably AlphaStar has a high eapm to apm ratio. https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Actions_per_Minute#APM_vs._eAPM https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Actions_per_Minute#APM_vs._...
  - cwkoss 8y ago
    It would be interesting if they made the AI harness add noise to the click position signal based on how long it has been since the last click. Ex. up to 5 perfectly targeted ClkPS, or up to 10 with 10px accuracy, or up to 15 with 30px accuracy

pacala 8y ago

When a swarm of killer drones comes down your neighborhood, good luck complaining "it wasn't a fair fight".

dragontamer 8y ago
We have fully automated homing cruise missiles since the 1980s. That's what modern combat is about these days. That's why guerilla fighters exist: to hide from US Troops because they can't win in a fair fight. They need to use civilians as shields (and there's no AI that can determine friend from foe yet). --------- The Starcraft demo was supposed to be a demonstration of intelligence. Not a demonstration of superior-accuracy and superior-dexterity that machines have. We've known for years that machines can see things at the millisecond level and react faster than us for some time. The AI problems trying to be solved today are "friend vs foe" recognition, strategic decision making, etc. etc. The AlphaGo game managed to demonstrate that. But the AlphaStar games only demonstrated what we already know about computers: Computers can click faster, and more accurately, than humans can.
- pacala 8y ago
  1 Tomahawk missile = $1,000,000 1 10kg payload drone = $10,000 Bonus: the killer drone can hang around for hours and tell fried from foe via biometric recognition [voice, face, gait], dutifully compiled by your nearby adtech multinational. Finally we can afford genocide on a private budget.