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> When I watched AlphaZero play chess, I was just a tiny bit impressed. I watched it beat the Go grandmaster and I was not very impressed. Then I watched it pla

> When I watched AlphaZero play chess, I was just a tiny bit impressed. I watched it beat the Go grandmaster and I was not very impressed. Then I watched it play Dota 2 -- in which I've sunk several thousand hours -- and holy crap. Wow! It was suddenly terrifying how good it was, because I could judge the nuance of what it was doing Funny, my game of choice is StarCraft 2 and when I watched AlphaStar beat StarCraft 2 pros I was significantly less impressed than when I watched AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go.

jiggawatts 3y ago
You should be more impressed knowing that that AlphaStar was handicapped. Its clicking was rate-limited and its inputs were delayed by something like 150 milliseconds to make it "fair" for the humans. If you remove those limits, it would absolutely wipe the floor with the twitching corpse of any human player. I saw it play Warcraft 2 without the limiters, and it was just ridiculous. It would dance the units around and keep using them with 1 hp left for many minutes and then heal them back up juuuuust enough to take exactly one hit from an enemy.
- whateveracct 3y ago
  But not having human reaction time in a real-time game isn't interesting. And the strategies that arise from that aren't either. If anything, human-level I/O constraints should make the AI more impressive because it's actually playing the same game.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  The handicapping was very ineffective. AlphaStar had 250-300+ APM and it was basically 100% effective APM. Pros have 300-400+ APM, but their effective APM is much lower due to spam patterns and checking production among other things. Almost everyone in the community seemed to agree AlphaStar was very unfair. Things like a 3 way surround and performing blink micro on individual Stalkers on opposite sides of the screen are completely inhuman. This is also what made the Dota 2 bots feel somewhat disappointing. Of course perfect mechanical skill beats humans. Watching the SF mid 1v1 matches illustrated this very clearly to me. The AI chipped the player down with perfect AAs, then finished them off with perfect distance razes. The bots weren't 100% mechanical skill, but it was a large enough proportion that it was uninteresting.
DharmaPolice 3y ago
My knowledge of Starcraft 2 is pretty limited so this is my lack of expertise speaking but it always felt like a strange choice to demonstrate AI skill. Even limiting the AI to human level actions per minute - so much of the game seems to about efficient multitasking which obviously computers are good at.

jiggawatts 3y ago

You should be more impressed knowing that that AlphaStar was handicapped. Its clicking was rate-limited and its inputs were delayed by something like 150 milliseconds to make it "fair" for the humans. If you remove those limits, it would absolutely wipe the floor with the twitching corpse of any human player. I saw it play Warcraft 2 without the limiters, and it was just ridiculous. It would dance the units around and keep using them with 1 hp left for many minutes and then heal them back up juuuuust enough to take exactly one hit from an enemy.

whateveracct 3y ago
But not having human reaction time in a real-time game isn't interesting. And the strategies that arise from that aren't either. If anything, human-level I/O constraints should make the AI more impressive because it's actually playing the same game.
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
The handicapping was very ineffective. AlphaStar had 250-300+ APM and it was basically 100% effective APM. Pros have 300-400+ APM, but their effective APM is much lower due to spam patterns and checking production among other things. Almost everyone in the community seemed to agree AlphaStar was very unfair. Things like a 3 way surround and performing blink micro on individual Stalkers on opposite sides of the screen are completely inhuman. This is also what made the Dota 2 bots feel somewhat disappointing. Of course perfect mechanical skill beats humans. Watching the SF mid 1v1 matches illustrated this very clearly to me. The AI chipped the player down with perfect AAs, then finished them off with perfect distance razes. The bots weren't 100% mechanical skill, but it was a large enough proportion that it was uninteresting.

DharmaPolice 3y ago

My knowledge of Starcraft 2 is pretty limited so this is my lack of expertise speaking but it always felt like a strange choice to demonstrate AI skill. Even limiting the AI to human level actions per minute - so much of the game seems to about efficient multitasking which obviously computers are good at.