14 ms·

APM is an interesting question I think. Like what is the relative importance of APM to strategy? If I have 20% more APM than you do I beat you even if I totall

APM is an interesting question I think. Like what is the relative importance of APM to strategy? If I have 20% more APM than you do I beat you even if I totally pick the wrong units and build order? Could a super smart bot win against pro's even if it's limited to 20% less APM? So yeah it might be interesting if the bot gets superhuman to trail several versions with progressively lower APM caps to see how much you have to limit it before humans can beat it again.

KKPMW 7y ago
APM ranges change the whole game. If you have low APM - one kind of units are superior. When APM get's higher - another unit might become superior. That is also why amateur players copying pro-players can loose to a "weaker" unit combinations. Because when you do things at 50 actions per minute you will not get the advantages of certain unit types. In the context of AlphaStar it was clearly visible in its first games. The AI chose ranged units and every commentator during that game was saying that AI has an inferior army. However when within the battle its APM were allowed to reach 1000 that type of unit became the best possible unit to have.
- mipmap04 7y ago
  Not only unit movement (micro), but your ability to macro (manage your economy, produce new units, expand your base) will be great affected if you have low APM. In that sense, APM is very important. I'm confident I can beat any bronze league (lowest tier) player with nearly any unit composition (even when they pick a build that is a direct counter to me) simply because I will way out produce the bronze player since I'll be able to stay on top of my macro due to superior APM.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
opportune 7y ago
>If I have 20% more APM than you do I beat you even if I totally pick the wrong units and build order At 20%, no. Pro players beat other pro players with 20% more apm all the time, even if they pick reasonable unit comps (this is especially common when terran players do tank focus builds against zerg). At 200%, especially if it's effective and not spamming, maybe. There are videos of bots microing marines at very high apm to beat big baneling balls, which cost much more resources and are supposed to directly counter marines. Protoss players could have perfect blink micro or immortal dropping, etc.
- ajuc 7y ago
  Alphastar restricted to lower average APM than MaNa beat MaNa's mass archon-immortal with mass blink stalkers :) He blinked stalkers at once from 3 sides of MaNa army (which was several-screens-wide). Such micro wouldn't be possible for a human player, because you would need to know to move the screen to see a particular stalkre just in time to blink it when he has almost 0 hitpoints, and immediately move the screen so you see another stalker on other part of the map to blink it, and so on. And the bot did this, making the strategy part of the game irrelevant (blink stalkers are supposed to lose vs immortals).
  - cjbprime 7y ago
    Exactly how AlphaStar was restricted is controversial. Its peak/burst APM during fights seemed extremely superhuman. That the average APM was lower doesn't mean much. Insane APM will win fights even without the multiple screen thing.
vkou 7y ago
> APM is an interesting question I think. Like what is the relative importance of APM to strategy? Depends on the strategy, and the skill level you play as, and what that APM is being used for. Among the lower 90% of play, a player with a very good understanding of strategy, and good prioritization of their actions (Spend money, don't get supply blocked, don't lose your army to a dumb blunder) will win ~100% of their matches with ~40 apm, assuming they plan to use a low-apm strategy (no fancy drop play, preference to units that don't require a lot of micromanagement.) On the masters/pro scene, though, you need a lot of APM just to stay alive. When there's three medivacs cycling drop harass in your main and natural, while helions keep running into the worker line of your fourth base, while your opponent's army is jostling for position with yours, trying to get a good angle to land EMPs, or to siege up in a good position, you're not going to be able to physically stay alive, unless you are devoting over a hundred APM to dealing with these threats. > If I have 20% more APM than you do I beat you even if I totally pick the wrong units and build order? That depends on what 'the wrong units and build order' means. Some build orders will straight up die to other build orders, assuming perfect play on both sides. Assuming non-perfect play, it depends on which mistakes are made by each side. Some build orders are soft-countered by other build orders. They can, theoretically, hold against a 'countering' build order - but will die, if the person using them makes some mistakes, and their opponent makes none. Likewise, 'the wrong units' is huge a bag of worms. Are zealots better units, cost-per-cost than marines? Yes, unless there's a critical mass of marines, at which point zealots become the 'wrong units' for that engagement. Throughout a game, there are ebbs and flows of strengths and weaknesses, between two players, as they hit their various tech timings/unit counts/positional advantages, and try to transform those short-term advantages into economic damage, or efficient army trades. A big part of pro play is knowing when you have an advantage you can exploit, how much you can exploit it, how to exploit it efficiently. You need game sense for the first, good strategic thinking for the second, and APM for the third. [1] I'm a pretty casual player, but I've had no problems hitting Master (5%) level in every season I've cared to play. I generally sit at ~90 APM, when I don't spam - and I presume that if I were much smarter, better with my timings, and more knowledgeable about the game, I could be in the 10th percentile with half the APM. The amount of extra game knowledge that pro players have, compared to me, is staggering.
kochthesecond 7y ago
The problem with the AI is that it is mechanically perfect with perfect accuracy every time. The AI never misclicks, even when under pressure.
- thelittleone 7y ago
  If this is a problem in need of solving couldn’t developers simply implement random miss-clicks or key stroke errors in a range similar to humans? Could be interesting to observe how the AI recovers.
  - solstice 7y ago
    Sounds like the chaos monkey program Netflix used to test is infrastructure by introducing random amounts of latency, switching off certain parts of the infrastructure etc
tialaramex 7y ago
Ketroc provides a useful data point. Ketroc plays Master level Terran SC2. His APM is poor, he sometimes gets supply blocked, his micro isn't great. But his strategic understanding is excellent. Ketroc grasps exactly what's going on, and also how other players are paying the game, which leads to him winning at Masters level (not pro but very good) where most competitors have high APM. Ketroc was famous in early SC2 for "that blue block is moving" a phrase from commentary of a game in which his opponent takes Ketroc's base but Ketroc's superior strategic understanding leads to an unconventional win.
- Narishma 7y ago
  Do you have a link to that game?
  - cecilpl2 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPGYeuU2Oc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPGYeuU2Oc
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPGYeuU2Oc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPGYeuU2Oc is the "When Cheese Fails" commentary of the 2011 game I mentioned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbfIVf49zXA&t=530s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbfIVf49zXA&t=530s is Day9 commentating on Ketroc doing something similar, but now aggressively, for a "FunDay Monday" (Day9 fans are tasked to play SC2 in some particular way, partly as training mostly as amusement).
invalidOrTaken 7y ago
This is definitely something I want to see. I can't get that excited about a bot that clicks faster (I suspect spell units---high templar, infestors, and ghosts---are the best way to leverage that in a reliable way). What I do get excited about is: what can AlphaStar teach us to help us play better? Another way to formulate this is: if you made AS as broken as it could possibly be by micro, what macro strategies would humans have to discover to beat it?
mafuyu 7y ago
APM is misleading because it can mean a lot of things. There are bots out there that will perfectly micro units to win battles that would typically trade out. SC2 is really about attention management- every action you take, like moving a worker to construct a building that you'll have money for in the future, takes time and attention, and good players will take the minimal action needed to get something done and then move their attention elsewhere while they wait (almost like CPU pipelining). This is why players will do runbys/drop harass at the same time as a big fight. It forces the defending player to spend more attention than the attacker, or risk losing key workers/buildings. APM is just a rough representation of the ability to multitask. From this perspective, AlphaStar's APM doesn't really matter. If it can instantly understand and juggle different scenarios occuring on the map at the same time (scouting, macro, battles, drop defense), that immediately puts it at an advantage, and many pro level strategies rely partially on pressuring the opponent until they make a mistake. The high level strategy stuff exists on top of all this, and that's what makes SC2 so difficult. AlphaStar is really impressive, but once it understands the game at some level, I think it's inevitably going to be better than human players. Human players are going to get wins off AlphaStar by forcing tactical errors in weird scenarios, but it's not going to look like typical human games.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  >> If it can instantly understand and juggle different scenarios occuring on the map at the same time (scouting, macro, battles, drop defense), that immediately puts it at an advantage, and many pro level strategies rely partially on pressuring the opponent until they make a mistake. Then you could restrict the AI to a certain amount of memory that is available to it. You could also play with latencies/exactness of the memories that is available to it.
- pixelpoet 7y ago
  I think it would be very interesting to keep the full map view, but then brutally limit the APM, within like a 1-2s window. Limiting map vision seems a kind of arbitrary limitation to me, an artifact of the particular minimap size Blizzard chose that you can't change; you should be able to change its resolution, size and placement as you like, and then face the computer on roughly equal terms (without its ability to do ridiculous micro, i.e. try to produce pure strategy games).
ajuc 7y ago
Have you seen the MaNa-AlphaStar games? The bot was restriced in APM (and had lower average APM over the whole game than the human players), but it wasn't restriced in how many times a second it can move the screen around. And it used APM limit very strategically - for most of the game it had low apm but in fights it had sometimes over 1000 APM :) It outmicroed MaNa (one of the most micro-focused protoss players) in several games, attacking and winning from positions it shouldn't be possible to do so. In one game it countered MaNa's big immortal-archon army with pure blink stalkers. The general consensus is that immortal-archon is the ultimate counter to stalkers :) The bot was doing perfect blink stalker micro from 3 sides of MaNa army at once over an area that was like 3-screens wide. It would be physically impossible for a human player to play like this, because moving the screen to blink each stalker as it gets near 0 hitpoints back and forth just can't be done fast enough, with 50 stalkers fighting - but for a bot it's easy. After these games they limited the alphastar to have limited speed of moving the camera, and that bot lost to MaNa (but it was also trained for less time so it might be not a good comparison), and MaNa strategy was a little cheesy in that game - harrasing with warp prism making the bot move his army back and forth. Starcraft 2 is as much a strategy game as a mechanical arcade game, different mechanical restrictions change which strategies work well vs which other strategies. The balance of the game is designed with human limitations of micro in mind, so when a bot plays it has to imitate these restrictions, or the game isn't fair. With perfect micro mass marines beat everything with ridiculous cost-effectiveness.
- bonzini 7y ago
  > With perfect micro mass marines beat everything with ridiculous cost-effectiveness What has changed in the bots, since the first competitions where having hundreds of zerglings used to beat all the other entries?
- vkou 7y ago
  > MaNa strategy was a little cheesy in that game - harrasing with warp prism making the bot move his army back and forth. Even from the games where MaNa lost, AlphaStar made incredibly poor big-picture strategic judgements, in terms of where to deploy its forces. It can't seem to smartly deal with harassment.
- 7y ago
Iv 7y ago
> If I have 20% more APM than you do I beat you even if I totally pick the wrong units and build order? Thing is, you are probably going to pick units that require more APM. Some units like the blink stalker really benefit from micro-management if you can do them quick enough. If you have enough APMs to juggle 5 or 6 immortals out of 2 warp prisms, you have a huge advantage even in front of an opponent with a superior strategy. And in the previous rounds, AlphaStar did have heavy APM limitations but they were criticized a lot because they allowed for very high APMs bursts. Being able to perfectly micro-manage engagements of 20+ blink stalker is going to do the equivalent of doubling your unit count. The other thing that differs from a human is that as the APM increases, the precision can suffer. Humans will misclick, will fail to select all the units they want, etc... AlphaStar will not because it essentially sees Starcraft as a turn-based game and can react perfectly to each tick. > Could a super smart bot win against pro's even if it's limited to 20% less APM? AlphaStar cheesy game against Mana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKX6AcgFOZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKX6AcgFOZU) convinces me that yes. It already happened, with a very creative strategy and adaptation.
- on_and_off 7y ago
  It makes sense to impose such heavy limitations to AlphaStar in order to have it demonstrate its mastery of the strategic aspects of starcraft. I am looking forward to seeing it applied to a problem where we don't tie one its hand behind its back though. There are probably real life situations (hopefully not war, although that will happen for sure) where being able to focus on 10 things at the same time and react extremely quickly without any fatigue would make an AI way more performant than humans. Come to think of it, fatigue might manifest in thermal throttling unless we conceive its chassis better than we do our phones and laptops.
  - Iv 7y ago
    I can't wait for Starcraft III and having AlphaStar roleplay one of my lieutenants.
    - on_and_off 7y ago
chapium 7y ago
starcraft is competitive enough that players practice both apm and strategy at a high level of sophistication
roenxi 7y ago
And it highlights a problem with using a game like StarCraft to measure AI - there isn't overwhelming evidence that the humans are winning by being better decision makers. If DeepMind wants a computer to win at StarCraft they can trivially make a computer win at StarCraft. The research seems to be in 'how do we handicap an AI so that it doesn't win easily by leveraging its more reliable sensors' and they are adding handicaps in a semi-random manner. That is nearly pointless; they need a different deterministic game where hidden information plays a bigger role and fast reaction times don't matter. Ignoring APM - what if it turns out that the better of two players isn't the one who makes better strategic decisions, but the one who can issue more effective tactical commands in a short burst? We can't measure that as it isn't APM but it is likely to be a huge factor. StarCraft AI have historically been handicapped by being unable to model tight tactical situations - if machine learning can come up with any model at all that works (and we now know it can) computers are simply so much better at making quick decisions that there is little left to see that is interesting. There isn't much left to prove.
- agent008t 7y ago
  GTA5 could be a more interesting benchmark. Leave a few whole missions out for the test set, and then see if the bot can beat those missions on the first go.
derefr 7y ago
> Like what is the relative importance of APM to strategy? I wouldn't so much talk about APM, as about time-costs of information. In real-time games like Starcraft, you have to spend time to look around the map and figure out what's changed in each area since you last saw it. The more of this "espionage" you do—and the longer it takes you to absorb what you see—the less time you can dedicate to actually doing things, making APM matter more and more. This—presumably—won't be a problem for AlphaStar, though, because with a limited APM, it will be able to process the information it receives far faster than it will be allowed to emit actions. Think of it like a robot that could read (and absorb!) a book by just flipping through the pages at speed. If AlphaCraft only needs to just slide their viewport across the whole map as fast as the client allows scrolling to happen, in order to learn everything about what's going on, then the time cost of their information is very low, so their APM is basically irrelevant. They have all the time in the world to do whatever they like. I'm looking forward to the presumptive second stage (AlphaStarZero? ZeroStar?) where the AI will train by playing itself. Because both sides would have equal APM potential, there's no reason to limit APM in that case. And, therefore, the game becomes a much more real equivalent to a normal StarCraft match, because once again the AI is put in a situation where the other player is reacting quickly-enough to their actions than they have to weigh "time spent learning what happened" against "time spent performing actions of their own based on incomplete information."
norswap 7y ago
In the demo matches in January, AlphaStar did deploy "superhuman" techniques (that even the top players can't deploy consistently or at all). IIRC the issues were: while AlphaStar had a per minute APM budget, it could distribute it strategically. The point was made that the peak wasn't much higher than pro players, but that fails to take into account that A* has much better timing and accuracy during these peaks. People in the comments made points about "perfect timing" and "management of focus" and I concur wholeheartedly.

KKPMW 7y ago

APM ranges change the whole game. If you have low APM - one kind of units are superior. When APM get's higher - another unit might become superior. That is also why amateur players copying pro-players can loose to a "weaker" unit combinations. Because when you do things at 50 actions per minute you will not get the advantages of certain unit types. In the context of AlphaStar it was clearly visible in its first games. The AI chose ranged units and every commentator during that game was saying that AI has an inferior army. However when within the battle its APM were allowed to reach 1000 that type of unit became the best possible unit to have.

mipmap04 7y ago
Not only unit movement (micro), but your ability to macro (manage your economy, produce new units, expand your base) will be great affected if you have low APM. In that sense, APM is very important. I'm confident I can beat any bronze league (lowest tier) player with nearly any unit composition (even when they pick a build that is a direct counter to me) simply because I will way out produce the bronze player since I'll be able to stay on top of my macro due to superior APM.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

opportune 7y ago

>If I have 20% more APM than you do I beat you even if I totally pick the wrong units and build order At 20%, no. Pro players beat other pro players with 20% more apm all the time, even if they pick reasonable unit comps (this is especially common when terran players do tank focus builds against zerg). At 200%, especially if it's effective and not spamming, maybe. There are videos of bots microing marines at very high apm to beat big baneling balls, which cost much more resources and are supposed to directly counter marines. Protoss players could have perfect blink micro or immortal dropping, etc.

ajuc 7y ago
Alphastar restricted to lower average APM than MaNa beat MaNa's mass archon-immortal with mass blink stalkers :) He blinked stalkers at once from 3 sides of MaNa army (which was several-screens-wide). Such micro wouldn't be possible for a human player, because you would need to know to move the screen to see a particular stalkre just in time to blink it when he has almost 0 hitpoints, and immediately move the screen so you see another stalker on other part of the map to blink it, and so on. And the bot did this, making the strategy part of the game irrelevant (blink stalkers are supposed to lose vs immortals).
- cjbprime 7y ago
  Exactly how AlphaStar was restricted is controversial. Its peak/burst APM during fights seemed extremely superhuman. That the average APM was lower doesn't mean much. Insane APM will win fights even without the multiple screen thing.

vkou 7y ago

> APM is an interesting question I think. Like what is the relative importance of APM to strategy? Depends on the strategy, and the skill level you play as, and what that APM is being used for. Among the lower 90% of play, a player with a very good understanding of strategy, and good prioritization of their actions (Spend money, don't get supply blocked, don't lose your army to a dumb blunder) will win ~100% of their matches with ~40 apm, assuming they plan to use a low-apm strategy (no fancy drop play, preference to units that don't require a lot of micromanagement.) On the masters/pro scene, though, you need a lot of APM just to stay alive. When there's three medivacs cycling drop harass in your main and natural, while helions keep running into the worker line of your fourth base, while your opponent's army is jostling for position with yours, trying to get a good angle to land EMPs, or to siege up in a good position, you're not going to be able to physically stay alive, unless you are devoting over a hundred APM to dealing with these threats. > If I have 20% more APM than you do I beat you even if I totally pick the wrong units and build order? That depends on what 'the wrong units and build order' means. Some build orders will straight up die to other build orders, assuming perfect play on both sides. Assuming non-perfect play, it depends on which mistakes are made by each side. Some build orders are soft-countered by other build orders. They can, theoretically, hold against a 'countering' build order - but will die, if the person using them makes some mistakes, and their opponent makes none. Likewise, 'the wrong units' is huge a bag of worms. Are zealots better units, cost-per-cost than marines? Yes, unless there's a critical mass of marines, at which point zealots become the 'wrong units' for that engagement. Throughout a game, there are ebbs and flows of strengths and weaknesses, between two players, as they hit their various tech timings/unit counts/positional advantages, and try to transform those short-term advantages into economic damage, or efficient army trades. A big part of pro play is knowing when you have an advantage you can exploit, how much you can exploit it, how to exploit it efficiently. You need game sense for the first, good strategic thinking for the second, and APM for the third. [1] I'm a pretty casual player, but I've had no problems hitting Master (5%) level in every season I've cared to play. I generally sit at ~90 APM, when I don't spam - and I presume that if I were much smarter, better with my timings, and more knowledgeable about the game, I could be in the 10th percentile with half the APM. The amount of extra game knowledge that pro players have, compared to me, is staggering.

kochthesecond 7y ago

The problem with the AI is that it is mechanically perfect with perfect accuracy every time. The AI never misclicks, even when under pressure.

thelittleone 7y ago
If this is a problem in need of solving couldn’t developers simply implement random miss-clicks or key stroke errors in a range similar to humans? Could be interesting to observe how the AI recovers.
- solstice 7y ago
  Sounds like the chaos monkey program Netflix used to test is infrastructure by introducing random amounts of latency, switching off certain parts of the infrastructure etc

tialaramex 7y ago

Ketroc provides a useful data point. Ketroc plays Master level Terran SC2. His APM is poor, he sometimes gets supply blocked, his micro isn't great. But his strategic understanding is excellent. Ketroc grasps exactly what's going on, and also how other players are paying the game, which leads to him winning at Masters level (not pro but very good) where most competitors have high APM. Ketroc was famous in early SC2 for "that blue block is moving" a phrase from commentary of a game in which his opponent takes Ketroc's base but Ketroc's superior strategic understanding leads to an unconventional win.

Narishma 7y ago
Do you have a link to that game?
- cecilpl2 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPGYeuU2Oc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPGYeuU2Oc
- tialaramex 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPGYeuU2Oc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPGYeuU2Oc is the "When Cheese Fails" commentary of the 2011 game I mentioned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbfIVf49zXA&t=530s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbfIVf49zXA&t=530s is Day9 commentating on Ketroc doing something similar, but now aggressively, for a "FunDay Monday" (Day9 fans are tasked to play SC2 in some particular way, partly as training mostly as amusement).

invalidOrTaken 7y ago

This is definitely something I want to see. I can't get that excited about a bot that clicks faster (I suspect spell units---high templar, infestors, and ghosts---are the best way to leverage that in a reliable way). What I do get excited about is: what can AlphaStar teach us to help us play better? Another way to formulate this is: if you made AS as broken as it could possibly be by micro, what macro strategies would humans have to discover to beat it?

mafuyu 7y ago

APM is misleading because it can mean a lot of things. There are bots out there that will perfectly micro units to win battles that would typically trade out. SC2 is really about attention management- every action you take, like moving a worker to construct a building that you'll have money for in the future, takes time and attention, and good players will take the minimal action needed to get something done and then move their attention elsewhere while they wait (almost like CPU pipelining). This is why players will do runbys/drop harass at the same time as a big fight. It forces the defending player to spend more attention than the attacker, or risk losing key workers/buildings. APM is just a rough representation of the ability to multitask. From this perspective, AlphaStar's APM doesn't really matter. If it can instantly understand and juggle different scenarios occuring on the map at the same time (scouting, macro, battles, drop defense), that immediately puts it at an advantage, and many pro level strategies rely partially on pressuring the opponent until they make a mistake. The high level strategy stuff exists on top of all this, and that's what makes SC2 so difficult. AlphaStar is really impressive, but once it understands the game at some level, I think it's inevitably going to be better than human players. Human players are going to get wins off AlphaStar by forcing tactical errors in weird scenarios, but it's not going to look like typical human games.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
>> If it can instantly understand and juggle different scenarios occuring on the map at the same time (scouting, macro, battles, drop defense), that immediately puts it at an advantage, and many pro level strategies rely partially on pressuring the opponent until they make a mistake. Then you could restrict the AI to a certain amount of memory that is available to it. You could also play with latencies/exactness of the memories that is available to it.
pixelpoet 7y ago
I think it would be very interesting to keep the full map view, but then brutally limit the APM, within like a 1-2s window. Limiting map vision seems a kind of arbitrary limitation to me, an artifact of the particular minimap size Blizzard chose that you can't change; you should be able to change its resolution, size and placement as you like, and then face the computer on roughly equal terms (without its ability to do ridiculous micro, i.e. try to produce pure strategy games).

ajuc 7y ago

Have you seen the MaNa-AlphaStar games? The bot was restriced in APM (and had lower average APM over the whole game than the human players), but it wasn't restriced in how many times a second it can move the screen around. And it used APM limit very strategically - for most of the game it had low apm but in fights it had sometimes over 1000 APM :) It outmicroed MaNa (one of the most micro-focused protoss players) in several games, attacking and winning from positions it shouldn't be possible to do so. In one game it countered MaNa's big immortal-archon army with pure blink stalkers. The general consensus is that immortal-archon is the ultimate counter to stalkers :) The bot was doing perfect blink stalker micro from 3 sides of MaNa army at once over an area that was like 3-screens wide. It would be physically impossible for a human player to play like this, because moving the screen to blink each stalker as it gets near 0 hitpoints back and forth just can't be done fast enough, with 50 stalkers fighting - but for a bot it's easy. After these games they limited the alphastar to have limited speed of moving the camera, and that bot lost to MaNa (but it was also trained for less time so it might be not a good comparison), and MaNa strategy was a little cheesy in that game - harrasing with warp prism making the bot move his army back and forth. Starcraft 2 is as much a strategy game as a mechanical arcade game, different mechanical restrictions change which strategies work well vs which other strategies. The balance of the game is designed with human limitations of micro in mind, so when a bot plays it has to imitate these restrictions, or the game isn't fair. With perfect micro mass marines beat everything with ridiculous cost-effectiveness.

bonzini 7y ago
> With perfect micro mass marines beat everything with ridiculous cost-effectiveness What has changed in the bots, since the first competitions where having hundreds of zerglings used to beat all the other entries?
vkou 7y ago
> MaNa strategy was a little cheesy in that game - harrasing with warp prism making the bot move his army back and forth. Even from the games where MaNa lost, AlphaStar made incredibly poor big-picture strategic judgements, in terms of where to deploy its forces. It can't seem to smartly deal with harassment.
7y ago

Iv 7y ago

> If I have 20% more APM than you do I beat you even if I totally pick the wrong units and build order? Thing is, you are probably going to pick units that require more APM. Some units like the blink stalker really benefit from micro-management if you can do them quick enough. If you have enough APMs to juggle 5 or 6 immortals out of 2 warp prisms, you have a huge advantage even in front of an opponent with a superior strategy. And in the previous rounds, AlphaStar did have heavy APM limitations but they were criticized a lot because they allowed for very high APMs bursts. Being able to perfectly micro-manage engagements of 20+ blink stalker is going to do the equivalent of doubling your unit count. The other thing that differs from a human is that as the APM increases, the precision can suffer. Humans will misclick, will fail to select all the units they want, etc... AlphaStar will not because it essentially sees Starcraft as a turn-based game and can react perfectly to each tick. > Could a super smart bot win against pro's even if it's limited to 20% less APM? AlphaStar cheesy game against Mana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKX6AcgFOZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKX6AcgFOZU) convinces me that yes. It already happened, with a very creative strategy and adaptation.

on_and_off 7y ago
It makes sense to impose such heavy limitations to AlphaStar in order to have it demonstrate its mastery of the strategic aspects of starcraft. I am looking forward to seeing it applied to a problem where we don't tie one its hand behind its back though. There are probably real life situations (hopefully not war, although that will happen for sure) where being able to focus on 10 things at the same time and react extremely quickly without any fatigue would make an AI way more performant than humans. Come to think of it, fatigue might manifest in thermal throttling unless we conceive its chassis better than we do our phones and laptops.
- Iv 7y ago
  I can't wait for Starcraft III and having AlphaStar roleplay one of my lieutenants.
  - on_and_off 7y ago

chapium 7y ago

starcraft is competitive enough that players practice both apm and strategy at a high level of sophistication

roenxi 7y ago

And it highlights a problem with using a game like StarCraft to measure AI - there isn't overwhelming evidence that the humans are winning by being better decision makers. If DeepMind wants a computer to win at StarCraft they can trivially make a computer win at StarCraft. The research seems to be in 'how do we handicap an AI so that it doesn't win easily by leveraging its more reliable sensors' and they are adding handicaps in a semi-random manner. That is nearly pointless; they need a different deterministic game where hidden information plays a bigger role and fast reaction times don't matter. Ignoring APM - what if it turns out that the better of two players isn't the one who makes better strategic decisions, but the one who can issue more effective tactical commands in a short burst? We can't measure that as it isn't APM but it is likely to be a huge factor. StarCraft AI have historically been handicapped by being unable to model tight tactical situations - if machine learning can come up with any model at all that works (and we now know it can) computers are simply so much better at making quick decisions that there is little left to see that is interesting. There isn't much left to prove.

agent008t 7y ago
GTA5 could be a more interesting benchmark. Leave a few whole missions out for the test set, and then see if the bot can beat those missions on the first go.

derefr 7y ago

> Like what is the relative importance of APM to strategy? I wouldn't so much talk about APM, as about time-costs of information. In real-time games like Starcraft, you have to spend time to look around the map and figure out what's changed in each area since you last saw it. The more of this "espionage" you do—and the longer it takes you to absorb what you see—the less time you can dedicate to actually doing things, making APM matter more and more. This—presumably—won't be a problem for AlphaStar, though, because with a limited APM, it will be able to process the information it receives far faster than it will be allowed to emit actions. Think of it like a robot that could read (and absorb!) a book by just flipping through the pages at speed. If AlphaCraft only needs to just slide their viewport across the whole map as fast as the client allows scrolling to happen, in order to learn everything about what's going on, then the time cost of their information is very low, so their APM is basically irrelevant. They have all the time in the world to do whatever they like. I'm looking forward to the presumptive second stage (AlphaStarZero? ZeroStar?) where the AI will train by playing itself. Because both sides would have equal APM potential, there's no reason to limit APM in that case. And, therefore, the game becomes a much more real equivalent to a normal StarCraft match, because once again the AI is put in a situation where the other player is reacting quickly-enough to their actions than they have to weigh "time spent learning what happened" against "time spent performing actions of their own based on incomplete information."

norswap 7y ago

In the demo matches in January, AlphaStar did deploy "superhuman" techniques (that even the top players can't deploy consistently or at all). IIRC the issues were: while AlphaStar had a per minute APM budget, it could distribute it strategically. The point was made that the peak wasn't much higher than pro players, but that fails to take into account that A* has much better timing and accuracy during these peaks. People in the comments made points about "perfect timing" and "management of focus" and I concur wholeheartedly.