They really should have used BroodWar for deep mind. SCII is way too volatile. Way more gimmicks available that will make it difficult for AI to come close to a human player.
BW isn't the perfect example or pure strategy, but there are dramatically less game-changing abilities in it. Think cyclone/marauder cheeses or 2 base warp gate allins or ravagers seiging your wall. SCII in general makes attacks come quicker relative to scouting. Injects, chrono, and mules make tech and attacks come sooner compared to BW. Reliable scouting is still basically tier 2.
>In its games against TLO and MaNa, AlphaStar had an average APM of around 280, significantly lower than the professional players, although its actions may be more precise. This lower APM is, in part, because AlphaStar starts its training using replays and thus mimics the way humans play the game.
https://deepmind.com/blog/alphastar-mastering-real-time-stra...
It's like saying that my car has an average speed of 2mph. Sure, it does - but that's because it spends 23 hours a day sitting in a garage.
I get the analogy but based on the distribution, 75% of the APM for alphastar is below the mean of APM for the human during gameplay. Following that analogy, both cars are on the racetrack, except one is applying acceleration with more precision - i.e. accelerating out of a turn rather than always accelerating. Capping acceleration wouldn't matter in this case.
Where did they say the spike was during a battle?
They did that in these games. (Or at least, it didn't abuse absurdly high APM.)
It still had insane micro a) because it had a FoV which basically extended to the combined FoV of all if its units[1] rather than having to move a screen-size FoV, and b) when it micros it never really "misclicks" like a human would do under pressure.
(This was most obvious in how it could micro against MaNa's army on 3 fronts in game 4 and how it was able to basically perfectly drain the Immortal barriers in the game where MaNa actually should have been able to defend against a human mass stalker build ~100% of the time.)
One thing they weren't clear on was how it could tell how much health, etc. each enemy unit had -- did it have to spend an "action" (like a player would have to click) to do that? If so, then that's even more insane in terms of micro ability.
Anyway, disagree about BW. Perfect micro in BW is possibly even more devastating than in SC2, IMO, because there are all these weird glitches that you can do -- the best players can do them some of the time, but no players can do it perfectly all of the time.
[1] This was not the case for the final game which it lost.
This is an oversight that I imagine they will eventually fix as well. Doesn't make sense to allow the AI to do this, because the focus is on the AI understanding the game.
>Anyway, disagree about BW. Perfect micro in BW is possibly even more devastating than in SC2, IMO, because there are all these weird glitches that you can do -- the best players can do them some of the time, but no players can do it perfectly all of the time.
I didn't mention micro specifically, I mentioned abilities. The perfect micro issue can again be solved by limiting the AI's APM. They may be able to execute micro tricks, but not constantly.
Instead we just watch the machines versus other machines.
This is why we didn't see "AlphaZero plays chess versus grand master" games - they'd be dull, A0 wipes the floor with grand masters because it's an AI and grand masters aren't, boring.
But lc0 and similar have been entering computer chess competitions with (a clone of) the Google Alpha Zero design. It does pretty well.
Just as with TAS in speed running, you get a synergy. On the one hand, the machines play a distinctly different game, perfect on its own terms, a TAS run never succeeds in a frame perfect trick on the second or third try, always the first - the AI will never mis-blink a stalker to a pointless death. But human play continues, not against the machine but parallel to it, and learning from it. Golden Eye speedrunning was hugely influenced by TAS findings. Modern human chess is influenced by the machine chess play styles.
A few months (maybe 1 year ago) the best AIs tried vs some "retired" pro-gamers (like Stork) - it was not even close.
Would have loved to see DeepMind trying to show what's possible here.
Edit: And reviewing the game it lost, the decision making was questionable at best.