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AlphaStar wasn't beating top pros, though. And even the players it was beating, it was with a heavy mechanical advantage -- not just on strategy and tactics. T

AlphaStar wasn't beating top pros, though. And even the players it was beating, it was with a heavy mechanical advantage -- not just on strategy and tactics. That AI's can beat human players via superior interface control is obvious, of course, and uninteresting from an AI standpoint. Starcraft has had AI's with perfect roach/stalker/marine/etc control for a while. The problem was that the overall strategies weren't good enough. AlphaStar did make massive improvements there, to be sure, very impressive ones. But it still relied on out-controlling human players to get the edge against pros.

tialaramex 6y ago
A legacy of the AlphaStar work is ongoing amateur SC2 AI play. If you're comfortable writing software in, say, Python, and can play SC2 at least a little, you can see whether the reason you aren't a world famous player is just that you were too slow or whether your strategy actually isn't that great even if executed perfectly :) https://sc2ai.net/competitions/3/ https://sc2ai.net/competitions/3/ Unlike Alphastar, these AIs are intended primarily to play each other because as you say inhuman perfection in execution is not an interesting difference. This means it makes sense for them to exploit behaviour in the game itself that would be inaccessible to humans (e.g. "speed mining" by individually controlling every worker) as well as executing ludicrously multi-pronged mid-game attacks since they can just as easily manage six individual small battles as one larger frontal assault. That site links a Twitch channel which automatically plays random games between bots with auto-camera, but if you prefer human commentators (and as a bonus, speeding up the period when the game is clearly lost but bots rudely never resign since it's not as though politeness scores points) there's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLpEzq_6_go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLpEzq_6_go which is the next ESChamps tournament cast later on Thursday.

tialaramex 6y ago

A legacy of the AlphaStar work is ongoing amateur SC2 AI play. If you're comfortable writing software in, say, Python, and can play SC2 at least a little, you can see whether the reason you aren't a world famous player is just that you were too slow or whether your strategy actually isn't that great even if executed perfectly :) https://sc2ai.net/competitions/3/ https://sc2ai.net/competitions/3/ Unlike Alphastar, these AIs are intended primarily to play each other because as you say inhuman perfection in execution is not an interesting difference. This means it makes sense for them to exploit behaviour in the game itself that would be inaccessible to humans (e.g. "speed mining" by individually controlling every worker) as well as executing ludicrously multi-pronged mid-game attacks since they can just as easily manage six individual small battles as one larger frontal assault. That site links a Twitch channel which automatically plays random games between bots with auto-camera, but if you prefer human commentators (and as a bonus, speeding up the period when the game is clearly lost but bots rudely never resign since it's not as though politeness scores points) there's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLpEzq_6_go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLpEzq_6_go which is the next ESChamps tournament cast later on Thursday.