4 ms·

These extremely difficult/impossible things didn't really give an advantage. For example, AlphaStar would sometimes click on an object at the border of the scre

These extremely difficult/impossible things didn't really give an advantage. For example, AlphaStar would sometimes click on an object at the border of the screen. For humans that would be almost impossible, because the screen would scroll when the mouse approaches the border. Similarly, AlphaStar would not play with group hotkeys, but use a different technique. However, in none of the analyses, people noticed things that would give AlphaStar an unfair advantage.

mieseratte 7y ago
> For humans that would be almost impossible, because the screen would scroll when the mouse approaches the border. That humans cannot reliably perform these actions because of the limitations of our corporeal form means that Alphastar has an advantage over a human player. Limiting APM isn't enough.
- floitsch 7y ago
  The question isn't whether the AI still has advantages, but whether it's an unfair one. The current restrictions were implemented with input from TLO, and seem to work quite nicely. One could, of course, add more restrictions (like not noticing things on the minimap all the time...), but that's not what's it about anymore. At this point, micro is comparable to humans, and we can start to compare macro and strategy. Fwiw, when I watched some of the replays, I was disappointed by AlphaStar. It's a very consistent player with few mistakes, but it isn't very reactive and definitely not inventive. Instead of switching tactics when things don't work out, it generally continues with the chosen strategy. Often, that's enough: a well executed strategy with few errors often wins, even if it wasn't optimal.
  - MiracleUser 7y ago
    > a well executed strategy with few errors often wins, even if it wasn't optimal I think this is hits the chord with why a lot of people are talking about this bot as cheating more than they are being outplayed. It's like fighting an aimbot in an FPS. They arent outsmarting you, but the mechanical consistency is inhuman and you are unable to force mistakes. At best itll feel like playing someone on their best day. The heart of gaming, and why starcrat2 in particular is popular, is finding ways to play around each others mistakes. Honestly, they should reduce Micro to the point that humans can bully it a little bit. How does the AI handle finding new ways to trade units to its advantage against a mechanically stronger opponent? How does it try to bait the human into having to take fights with unfavorable units / strategy.. as opposed to beating through them with mechanic mastery
    - wpasc 7y ago
      The issue with limiting it past what humans can do is that in the self play training they'd never encounter what humans could do. The benefits of trying to make the limitations somewhat human-like is that the self play optimizes around roughly what it will encounter when it goes against humans
      - anonymfus 7y ago
        May be make self-play asymmetrical so sides in the game would have different sets of limitations? So main agent would have subhuman micro and exploiter agents would have superhuman micro.
    - floitsch 7y ago
      I don't think the comparison with aimbots is fair. Aimbots are more like a perfect micro. In the beginning (when they did their first show match), Alphastar was insane at that. Now the micro is not giving an advantage anymore. Where alphastar shines, is in making a strategy work. It won't attack into something that looks dangerous. It won't forget to build more units. It won't be distracted on two fronts. (That said: Alphastar did some really stupid mistakes as well.) I agree with you, though: it would be much more interesting, if Alphastar was actually handicapped in the micro (at least at a later point in the game). Then it would really need to find interesting strategies and counter opposing units with more cost-efficient ones.
      - MiracleUser 7y ago
        >Now the micro is not giving an advantage anymore. I guess I need to learn more about the details here. Robotic consistency is a significant advantage, so unless it is handicapped I dont think the result is much of a leap from what we learned by it being insane at micro. You can feel consistency on your opponent and it is extremely intimidating. Usually, players are consistent at different things.. like my micro might be much better with marines than tanks. To have consistent human-level micro across all units is already a huge advantage. I agree the aimbot comparison is excessive, but the hyperbole was good for getting the point across. You could take an fps AI with aimbot, and give it 220 ms input lag to say it doesnt have advantage over players anymore - but its still going to climb to the top of the ladder system because it isnt going to miss. It is either advantaged at aiming or disadvantaged based on that 1 number
  - skybrian 7y ago
    I think it's less about fairness and more about what's interesting? When the AI finds an advantage that makes its gameplay kind of boring, nerf it somehow to see what else it can do.
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  It's an AI system, of course it has some advantage, that's why we are building them.
  - sidlls 7y ago
    The advantage here is due to artifice and not necessarily generalizable.
gwd 7y ago
> These extremely difficult/impossible things didn't really give an advantage. One of the videos I watched compared APM (Actions Per Minute) with EPM (Effective actions Per Minute). AlphaStar always has them nearly identical, which would be (according to him) basically impossible for humans.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  Of course it's impossible for humans. Humans are used to clicking multiple times to do an action. Some actions you want to take in the game are very important, failure to do them correctly can mean a lost game, for example moving units in combat properly. This means that it's better to spam click that action a few times to make sure that the button press is registered properly, because it is possible for button presses to fail due to hardware, software, and most often a coordination error. This means that essentially every player has a much higher APM than EPM, but it's really EPM that counts. APM itself is mostly irrelevant.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    Hmm, seems like it might be interesting to add a slight error rate for AI clicking and see how it handles it?
    - doctorpangloss 7y ago
      You only need excess dexterity than your opponent, and only for a couple seconds, to decisively win a match in SC2. Error rates, EPM and APM are all red herrings.
- dave_b 7y ago
  Right, one example I remember from watching the games back in January was stalker micro. The high EPM of the AI allowed it to micro them picture perfectly and blink every single one away right before it died. In doing so it won a battle against impossible odds, and the announcers even commented on how it was way beyond the capabilities of the best players.
justicezyx 7y ago
What you said is a meaningful advtange. Scrolling screen is a major action to gather info and control units. If one can control near edge units without scrolling it gives more stable view and lower chance of making mistakes.
- Shaddox 7y ago
  There's an in-game option to disable scrolling the screen with the mouse and doing it with only the keyboard.

mieseratte 7y ago

> For humans that would be almost impossible, because the screen would scroll when the mouse approaches the border. That humans cannot reliably perform these actions because of the limitations of our corporeal form means that Alphastar has an advantage over a human player. Limiting APM isn't enough.

floitsch 7y ago
The question isn't whether the AI still has advantages, but whether it's an unfair one. The current restrictions were implemented with input from TLO, and seem to work quite nicely. One could, of course, add more restrictions (like not noticing things on the minimap all the time...), but that's not what's it about anymore. At this point, micro is comparable to humans, and we can start to compare macro and strategy. Fwiw, when I watched some of the replays, I was disappointed by AlphaStar. It's a very consistent player with few mistakes, but it isn't very reactive and definitely not inventive. Instead of switching tactics when things don't work out, it generally continues with the chosen strategy. Often, that's enough: a well executed strategy with few errors often wins, even if it wasn't optimal.
- MiracleUser 7y ago
  > a well executed strategy with few errors often wins, even if it wasn't optimal I think this is hits the chord with why a lot of people are talking about this bot as cheating more than they are being outplayed. It's like fighting an aimbot in an FPS. They arent outsmarting you, but the mechanical consistency is inhuman and you are unable to force mistakes. At best itll feel like playing someone on their best day. The heart of gaming, and why starcrat2 in particular is popular, is finding ways to play around each others mistakes. Honestly, they should reduce Micro to the point that humans can bully it a little bit. How does the AI handle finding new ways to trade units to its advantage against a mechanically stronger opponent? How does it try to bait the human into having to take fights with unfavorable units / strategy.. as opposed to beating through them with mechanic mastery
  - wpasc 7y ago
    The issue with limiting it past what humans can do is that in the self play training they'd never encounter what humans could do. The benefits of trying to make the limitations somewhat human-like is that the self play optimizes around roughly what it will encounter when it goes against humans
    - anonymfus 7y ago
      May be make self-play asymmetrical so sides in the game would have different sets of limitations? So main agent would have subhuman micro and exploiter agents would have superhuman micro.
  - floitsch 7y ago
    I don't think the comparison with aimbots is fair. Aimbots are more like a perfect micro. In the beginning (when they did their first show match), Alphastar was insane at that. Now the micro is not giving an advantage anymore. Where alphastar shines, is in making a strategy work. It won't attack into something that looks dangerous. It won't forget to build more units. It won't be distracted on two fronts. (That said: Alphastar did some really stupid mistakes as well.) I agree with you, though: it would be much more interesting, if Alphastar was actually handicapped in the micro (at least at a later point in the game). Then it would really need to find interesting strategies and counter opposing units with more cost-efficient ones.
    - MiracleUser 7y ago
      >Now the micro is not giving an advantage anymore. I guess I need to learn more about the details here. Robotic consistency is a significant advantage, so unless it is handicapped I dont think the result is much of a leap from what we learned by it being insane at micro. You can feel consistency on your opponent and it is extremely intimidating. Usually, players are consistent at different things.. like my micro might be much better with marines than tanks. To have consistent human-level micro across all units is already a huge advantage. I agree the aimbot comparison is excessive, but the hyperbole was good for getting the point across. You could take an fps AI with aimbot, and give it 220 ms input lag to say it doesnt have advantage over players anymore - but its still going to climb to the top of the ladder system because it isnt going to miss. It is either advantaged at aiming or disadvantaged based on that 1 number
- skybrian 7y ago
  I think it's less about fairness and more about what's interesting? When the AI finds an advantage that makes its gameplay kind of boring, nerf it somehow to see what else it can do.
tiborsaas 7y ago
It's an AI system, of course it has some advantage, that's why we are building them.
- sidlls 7y ago
  The advantage here is due to artifice and not necessarily generalizable.

gwd 7y ago

> These extremely difficult/impossible things didn't really give an advantage. One of the videos I watched compared APM (Actions Per Minute) with EPM (Effective actions Per Minute). AlphaStar always has them nearly identical, which would be (according to him) basically impossible for humans.

Mirioron 7y ago
Of course it's impossible for humans. Humans are used to clicking multiple times to do an action. Some actions you want to take in the game are very important, failure to do them correctly can mean a lost game, for example moving units in combat properly. This means that it's better to spam click that action a few times to make sure that the button press is registered properly, because it is possible for button presses to fail due to hardware, software, and most often a coordination error. This means that essentially every player has a much higher APM than EPM, but it's really EPM that counts. APM itself is mostly irrelevant.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Hmm, seems like it might be interesting to add a slight error rate for AI clicking and see how it handles it?
  - doctorpangloss 7y ago
    You only need excess dexterity than your opponent, and only for a couple seconds, to decisively win a match in SC2. Error rates, EPM and APM are all red herrings.
dave_b 7y ago
Right, one example I remember from watching the games back in January was stalker micro. The high EPM of the AI allowed it to micro them picture perfectly and blink every single one away right before it died. In doing so it won a battle against impossible odds, and the announcers even commented on how it was way beyond the capabilities of the best players.

justicezyx 7y ago

What you said is a meaningful advtange. Scrolling screen is a major action to gather info and control units. If one can control near edge units without scrolling it gives more stable view and lower chance of making mistakes.

Shaddox 7y ago
There's an in-game option to disable scrolling the screen with the mouse and doing it with only the keyboard.