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> this approach wasn't successful in "solving" Starcraft) Why do you say that? As I understand it, AlphaStar beat pros consistently, including a not widely rep

> this approach wasn't successful in "solving" Starcraft) Why do you say that? As I understand it, AlphaStar beat pros consistently, including a not widely reported showmatch against Serral when he was BlizzCon champ.

zwaps 5y ago
Not once humans adapted to it afaik. AlphaStar got to top grandmaster level and then that was it, as people found ways to beat it. Now, it may be that the team considered the project complete and stopped training it. But technically - as it stands - Starcraft is still the one game where humans beat AI.
- cjbprime 5y ago
  No, the version which played on ladder was much weaker than the later version which played against pros and was at BlizzCon -- the later version was at professional level of play.
gavagai691 5y ago
Two possible reasons. 1. First, though I am not sure of this (i.e. this should be verified), I heard that the team working on AlphaStar initially tried to create a Starcraft AI entirely through "self-play," but this was not successful. (Intuitively, in a real-time game, there are too many bad options too early on that even with a LOT of time to learn, if your approach is too "random" you will quickly enter an unwinnable position and not learn anything useful.) As a result, they replaced this approach with an approach which incorporated learning from human games. 2. "including a not widely reported showmatch against Serral when he was BlizzCon champ." is a mischaracterization. It was not a "showmatch," rather there was a setup at Blizzcon where anyone could sit down and play against AlphaStar, and Serral at some point sat down to play AlphaStar there. He went 0-4 vs AlphaStar's protoss and zerg, and 1-0 vs its Terran. However, not only was he not using his own keyboard and mouse, but he could not use any custom hotkeys. If you do not play Starcraft it may not be obvious just how large of a difference this could make. BTW, when Serral played (perhaps an earlier iteration of) AlphaStar's terran on the SC2 ladder, he demolished it. I remember when seeing the final report, I was a bit disappointed. It seemed like they cut the project off at a strange point, before AlphaStar was clearly better than humans. I feel that if they had continued they could have gotten to that point, but now we will never know.
- dwohnitmok 5y ago
  > but he could not use any custom hotkeys. IIRC you could and Serral did set his own custom keybindings on the machine. The main difference was different keyboard and mouse.
  - gavagai691 5y ago
    I looked into this again and the hotkey situation seems more unclear than I suggested. You could not log into your Battle.net account, so it would have been somewhat time consuming to change all of your settings manually. If I had to guess, I might wager that Serral changed some of the more important ones manually but not the others, but this is just conjecture and maybe he changed all of them. I don't know if anyone but Serral would know this, however. In any case, Serral said this, which you can take as you will: https://twitter.com/ENCE_Serral/status/1192023800961019904 https://twitter.com/ENCE_Serral/status/1192023800961019904 "It was okay, I doubt i would lose too many games with a proper setup. I think the 6.3-6.4 mmr is pretty accurate, so not bad at all but nothing special at the same time." On the one hand, surely it doesn't seem surprising that the player who lost, the human, would say the above, and so one may be skeptical of how unbiased Serral's assessment is. On the other hand, I would say that Serral is among the more frank and level-headed players I've seen in the various videogames I've followed, so I wouldn't be too hasty to write off his assessment for this reason.
- fuy 5y ago
  "It seemed like they cut the project off at a strange point, before AlphaStar was clearly better than humans. I feel that if they had continued they could have gotten to that point" What if that's why they cut it off..
  - gavagai691 5y ago
    Apologies, I don't quite follow your reasoning.
    - hnfong 5y ago
callmekit 5y ago
There were numerous issues. First one (somewhat mitigated lately) was extremely large number of actions per minute and (most importantly) extremely fast reaction speed. Another big issue is that the bot communicated with the game via a custom API, not a via images and clicks. Details of this API are unknown - like how invisible units were handled, but it was much higher level than a human would have (pixels). If you look at the games, the bot wasn't clever (which was a hope), just fast and precise. And some people far from the top were able to beat it convincingly. And now the project is gone, even before people had a chance to really play against the bot and find more weaknesses.

zwaps 5y ago

Not once humans adapted to it afaik. AlphaStar got to top grandmaster level and then that was it, as people found ways to beat it. Now, it may be that the team considered the project complete and stopped training it. But technically - as it stands - Starcraft is still the one game where humans beat AI.

cjbprime 5y ago
No, the version which played on ladder was much weaker than the later version which played against pros and was at BlizzCon -- the later version was at professional level of play.

gavagai691 5y ago

Two possible reasons. 1. First, though I am not sure of this (i.e. this should be verified), I heard that the team working on AlphaStar initially tried to create a Starcraft AI entirely through "self-play," but this was not successful. (Intuitively, in a real-time game, there are too many bad options too early on that even with a LOT of time to learn, if your approach is too "random" you will quickly enter an unwinnable position and not learn anything useful.) As a result, they replaced this approach with an approach which incorporated learning from human games. 2. "including a not widely reported showmatch against Serral when he was BlizzCon champ." is a mischaracterization. It was not a "showmatch," rather there was a setup at Blizzcon where anyone could sit down and play against AlphaStar, and Serral at some point sat down to play AlphaStar there. He went 0-4 vs AlphaStar's protoss and zerg, and 1-0 vs its Terran. However, not only was he not using his own keyboard and mouse, but he could not use any custom hotkeys. If you do not play Starcraft it may not be obvious just how large of a difference this could make. BTW, when Serral played (perhaps an earlier iteration of) AlphaStar's terran on the SC2 ladder, he demolished it. I remember when seeing the final report, I was a bit disappointed. It seemed like they cut the project off at a strange point, before AlphaStar was clearly better than humans. I feel that if they had continued they could have gotten to that point, but now we will never know.

dwohnitmok 5y ago
> but he could not use any custom hotkeys. IIRC you could and Serral did set his own custom keybindings on the machine. The main difference was different keyboard and mouse.
- gavagai691 5y ago
  I looked into this again and the hotkey situation seems more unclear than I suggested. You could not log into your Battle.net account, so it would have been somewhat time consuming to change all of your settings manually. If I had to guess, I might wager that Serral changed some of the more important ones manually but not the others, but this is just conjecture and maybe he changed all of them. I don't know if anyone but Serral would know this, however. In any case, Serral said this, which you can take as you will: https://twitter.com/ENCE_Serral/status/1192023800961019904 https://twitter.com/ENCE_Serral/status/1192023800961019904 "It was okay, I doubt i would lose too many games with a proper setup. I think the 6.3-6.4 mmr is pretty accurate, so not bad at all but nothing special at the same time." On the one hand, surely it doesn't seem surprising that the player who lost, the human, would say the above, and so one may be skeptical of how unbiased Serral's assessment is. On the other hand, I would say that Serral is among the more frank and level-headed players I've seen in the various videogames I've followed, so I wouldn't be too hasty to write off his assessment for this reason.
fuy 5y ago
"It seemed like they cut the project off at a strange point, before AlphaStar was clearly better than humans. I feel that if they had continued they could have gotten to that point" What if that's why they cut it off..
- gavagai691 5y ago
  Apologies, I don't quite follow your reasoning.
  - hnfong 5y ago

callmekit 5y ago

There were numerous issues. First one (somewhat mitigated lately) was extremely large number of actions per minute and (most importantly) extremely fast reaction speed. Another big issue is that the bot communicated with the game via a custom API, not a via images and clicks. Details of this API are unknown - like how invisible units were handled, but it was much higher level than a human would have (pixels). If you look at the games, the bot wasn't clever (which was a hope), just fast and precise. And some people far from the top were able to beat it convincingly. And now the project is gone, even before people had a chance to really play against the bot and find more weaknesses.