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Comment by Veelox | Hacker News Reader

Wow, Alphastar was able to 5-0 vs TLO (when he was off racing) and 5-0 vs Mana in an impressive manner. I am quite impressed that DeepMind has been able to take down Go and now Starcraft. From here on out, if DeepMind makes an announcement about a demonstration of X, I expect them to beat the top humans at X.

Edit: In the live game Mana is able to beat Alphastar. Alphastar was trained with a more limited camera than the previous games. Mana was able to harass Alphastar with a warp prism then push in and win.

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TLO and Mana are good players but Im not sure they fulfill your criteria of top humans at X

According to a site [1] Mana is 19th. While that is probably overly high, I would say he is easily in the top 200 Starcraft 2 players in the world. I would also say that to get from beating a top 200 human to beating all humans is much smaller than from scratch to beating a top 200 human.

[1] https://www.gosugamers.net/starcraft2/rankings

Aligulac's had Mana around 50th in the world consistently for a recent 12 month period, so I think that's a more reasonable claim, and I'm happy saying that the 50th best player is a "top player in the world".

Is Mana the best Protoss player in Europe?

Second-best, probably. Best Protoss players, approximate from older Aligulac data:

1. Classic (Korea)

2. Zest (Korea)

3. herO (Korea)

4. Stats (Korea)

5. Neeb (USA)

6. Dear (Korea)

7. Trap (Korea)

8. ShoWTimE (Europe)

9. MaNa (Europe)

he had the 2nd most WCS points in 2018 of all european protoss with Showtime having vastly more: https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Main_Page

Aligulac is not that good, the current top 10 is highly debatable, I'd argue the only thing the current top 10 gets correct is Maru/Serral top 2, though Maru being first is a stretch as he hasn't beaten Serral and was easily countered at Blizzcon by simple strategies. I'd agree with him as #1 if he had any flexibility to not just cheese his opponents out (see Keen Ro16 matches, sOs, numerous proxies vs TY, etc.) Maru's a fantastic player but Aligulac has no way to judge his strategic inflexibility.

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