I think a far more interesting limitation would be to cap APM at 150 or so, or to artificially limit action precision with some sort of virtual mouse that reduced accuracy as APM increased.
IIRC OpenAI limits the reaction time to ~200ms when playing DoTA2. AI employing better strategies than humans will always be more interesting than AI that can out click humans.
I would love to see these AIs get handicapped even more like a full second and really force them to out think humans.
As an aside, a few pro gamers prefer to play on windowed mode for exactly this reason.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but 6 posts with no profanity is hardly "uproar" by blizzard forums standards.
It struggles with camera placement like real players :) And uses popular divert-attention tactics, which shows it understand that part of the game - for example when it sends oracles to mineral line at the same time as it attacks in front. Previous versions didn't do that, because they were taught playing vs cheating AI - so no point diverting attention of something that has instant access to any unit on the map :)
It also struggles to defend against adept harras beacuse it has "tunnel vision" - controls its oracle instead of defending probes at home. Mana actually managed his attention budget a lot better (this is a crucial pro-player skill in starcraft - harras is effective because it trades little of your attention for a lot of attention of the enemy, it's a skill that becomes irrelevant when opponent doesn't really have "attention" and can perceive and interact with all units on the map at once like previous version of alphastar).
This one is much more human, and much lower level. In my opinion it lost unfair advantage, so the mistakes in its errormaking are revealed. Previously it never was behind and never had to react to human player strategy - it rarely even scouted because what's the point - it wanted to build mass stalkers anyway.
Or, what if we slow down the game, so that the human can actually pause the game each second and consider what to do next. That's basically what the computer is allowed to do
While this would make it more fair, it would just make the micro game more similar to chess or go. I don't think humans would necessarily win in the end.
The former is an interesting AI challenge/achievement, the latter is a space in which computers are already known to outperform humans.
Starcraft is like chess in some sense. The largest fundamental difference is that it isn't a perfect information game.
But ofc, there’s no tbs or grand strategy currently out there with a real tournament scene, so you can’t really count on the devs implementing an AI-API, or even properly balanced / bug-free (far more user-testing goes into sc2/dota2 than say civ, simply by virtue of its playerbase).
That's the primary benefit imo. The bigger action space is largely composed of non-strategic elements, at least in the sense of long-term strategies, eg micro and mini-skirmish tactics, that I don't think are as interesting. Ofc its clearly a conflict of interest, but my feeling was the most interesting aspect of Go/Chess is the AI making unintuitive discoveries that benefit the long-term. The human-collective machine is pretty good on its own at finding the shorter-term strategies; I don't think AI will make much significant impact in that space.
games as a medium to study upcoming real-world applications (eg cars), RTS makes sense; but as a medium to study AI beating humans, TBS is more appropriate (their ability to explore large search-spaces is far more interesting/potentially impactful). Studying both would be ideal ofc, but in a pick-one situation, TBS is better imo. But only RTS are even really viable atm, which is disappointing.
Upgrade building 3 comes available when you have enough resources.
A separate tab with insufficient resources gives you an overview with what you need to finish a,b,c.
A red alert appears when an enemy is spotted. You can click nearby units attack or a FSM with the attack strategy.
An finished building automatically will be placed near the town center.
Not working farmers can search for resources.
A wall is suggested by your current buildings, you can set an margin of eg. 20 meters.
The question is, how much programming will the custom UI need ( and how deep) to make it a lot more efficient
Macro-wise, it would be like an unwieldly minimap which already exists so people can get a sense of where the enemy is moving. With a giant screen, information is not focused on a small area, so you are limited to your FOV. Minimap which shows unit strength in terms of armor hp or shields as well as placement would be ideal information.
Micro-wise, it would be like sitting in front of a giant text display looking at a whole book. You still have to focus on a small section to read it.
I would like to see a setup akin to that of Ender Wiggin, with one commander overseeing and recommending overall strategy, and, say, five others managing different areas or groups. That seems like the way to get the best human performance, and might be enough to beat the AIs—at least to nullify chunks of their advantage.
At that point the name of the game will be maximizing the advantage the body/infrastructure provides the AI, not minimizing it.
Weird.
"Brute force" in AI context is usually reserved for traversal of the entire search space. I think "superhuman micromanagement" is a better term. And before AlphaStar superhuman micro wasn't insurmountable obstacle for human players.
They could train against the API, reinforcing the AI trying to predict the state from vision. But with limited APM it would be pretty difficult for the AI to keep track of everything. And, potentially, it would still not be the same as a human looking at it. I'm not sure whether human attention is a particularly bad example of efficient resource allocation. I'm very biased to think it is still the gold standard. But the fact that deepmind didn't focus on this implies they were not finding it interesting enough, and/or too difficult.
Anyhow, (visual) exploration is a step up from mere image recognition
A simpler model would be to limit the bot to, say, one action per 250ms, introduce a slight delay in his reaction time, require him to move the camera to gain detailed information and take further actions, and have camera movements count as actions.
The skepticism in this thread is absolutely justified but I think it's important to note the lengths to which DeepMind has gone to address and assuage the fears of superhuman mechanical skills being employed in these games.
This is compounded by the fact that almost all of AlphaStar’s actions are “useful” whereas a significant amount of the human actions are spammy.
You will typically see a human select a group of units, and fast-click a location in the general direction they want the units to move (to get them started moving that way), and then keep clicking to continuously update the destination to a more precise location. Every click counts as an action. An AI can be perfectly precise and “clicks” the right place the first time.
Fair point about humans needing minor adjustments though. Another comment also mentioned a bug in the APM measurement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18994350
Meanwhile humans are literally spamming keys to keep their physical fingers loose and ready - they're not performing anything close to 400 useful APM on a regular basis (or in TLO's case - 1500 ... He kept walking his units straight into death while spamming keys).
Exactly, a human doing 500 APM during intense moments is going to be way different than an AI bursting 1000 APM with pixel-precision during the most crucial moment in a game.
TLO spent a ton of time at >1000 APM and walked his army directly into enemy shots all the time. MaNa had much better control at ~400 APM. So APM is really irrelevant to control - for humans.
I suspect the AI, on the other hand, makes each action precise & count for something.
This graph, which I think was supposed to show that the AI was being "human", IMO is pretty damning. We saw the APM spike to >1000 during a critical moment and we saw the APM at <30 during lulls, so we know it uses its APM at important moments, presumably with important pixel-precise actions.
https://deepmind.com/blog/alphastar-mastering-real-time-stra...
As a hopefully illustrative comparison, you could give any top player a day of play time per move against the top Chess AI being given a minute of play time per move and the AI will still win. That's how much better the AIs are than humans now. There's no reason in principle this won't be possible with StarCraft AI too.
And then when you drop the APM limit, suddenly all the learned optimal ai strategies start falling apart, and the whole thing has to be relearned.
More annoyingly, there’s not much for human players to learn from innovative ai strategies that are based on inhuman accuracy of play (because we couldn’t possibly execute it).
StarCraft is more random than chess, so I do think it's possible humans will always be able to take occasional games off of fairly constrained AIs just based off blind luck in picking counter builds, it will be interesting to see what % that is.
Yes, I have one from it and wasn't even playing that high (I averaged less than 100 apm). I understand that it's a common problem.
"Liquid regretfully announces that Dario “TLO” Wünsch will be unable to play for the next few months due to the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome he experiences in both hands. He will however continue to be involved with E-Sports even as he takes a break from gaming to give his wrists time to heal. Sadly, this means that he will not be attending Dreamhack Summer or the Homestory Cup III as a player."
Most music should be playable without excessive risk of serious injury to arms / wrists / hands, but from what I understand very high notes on e.g. the violin are hard to play without using an over-flexed wrist, which is definitely a problem if playing music requiring such a position for long stretches of time, or many rapid switches between high and low notes.
Some of the string players with most risk are novices who have not been taught proper technique.
For professional PC game players, the design of the standard computer keyboard and furniture is absolutely terrible from an RSI perspective (worse than any common musical instrument, and without any of the design requirements of acoustic instruments as an excuse), and it is shocking to me that there has not been more effort to get more ergonomic equipment into players’ hands. The way game players typically use a computer keyboard is generally more dangerous than the way typists or e.g. programmers do. As someone who spent a few years thinking about computer keyboard design, I can think of at least a dozen straight-forward and fairly obvious changes that could be made to a standard computer keyboard to make it more efficient and less risky for game players. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit here.
Whether or not the equipment is changed, the most important single thing when using a computer keyboard (or any hand tool for that matter) is to avoid more than slight wrist flexion or extension, especially while doing work with the fingers. Excessive pronation and ulnar deviation of the wrist are also quite bad. Watching pro players, many of them have their wrists in an extremely awkward position while doing fast repetitive finger motions for hours per day without breaks, which is a guaranteed recipe for RSI.
I like the idea of having action noise that's linearly related to APM
It isn't surprising that its fast, the surprising part is that it can make human-like decisions. The only way to compare whether its thinking is human-like is to restrain it from "brute forcing" the contest through speed.
The model has likely learned that the faster it does things the better the outcome. What it needs to be measured on is strategy.
In that context, you can't really measure strategy without accounting for timing/speed because a lot of tactics and strategies only become viable once the player has the required speed to actually realize them aka "micro".
Making an AI that wins by outsmarting humans, on the other hand, is what we are all interested in.
It’s not good at strategizing with all the options available to it given it’s micro ability, it has “one” strategy that leveraged the micro as much as it could, and when given a strategic challenge by mana, it didn’t know what to do.
They want to make an AI that can teach new ideas to humans. New strategies that human bodies are physically capable of executing, but no human was "smart enough" to think of yet. An example is when the AI built a high number of probes at the start. That's "smart".
The only way to train an AI to be able to come up with new ideas, is to force it to be "slow". Otherwise, it will just always do the easiest way to win, which is out-micro. There is nothing interesting about a game like that. That only shows the AI is fast, but it won't be clear that it's "smart"
They don't, because AI doesn't use physical objects to move stuff in the game. AI just "thinks" that this stalker should blink and it blinks. Human player has to deal with inertia of his hand and of mouse.
If you want fair competition of micro - make a robot that watches screen through it's camera, moves mouse and presses keys to play starcraft.
Then the bandwith of the interface is the same for both players, and we can compare their micro.
If we want to measure strategy, I agree with you, and out of curiosity we might do it. But the goal is winning, so is strategy important as long as it wins? The AI can take every shortcut it finds IMHO. People do take shortcuts.
Cars and planes bring us across the world exactly because they don't walk like people and don't fly like birds. Wheels, fixed wings and turbofans are shortcuts and we're happy with them. We can build walking and wing flapping robots but they have different goals than what we need in our daily transportation activities.
If you want to make it fair - place an AI-steered robot in front of the screen, and make it record the screen with camera, and actually move the mouse and press the keys.
Then I can agree it's fair :)
But then of course AI would be incredibly bad.
Right now the advantage doesn't come from faster thinking, but from much higher bandwith and precision that AI has when controlling the game. It's anything but fair.
With chess it's not a problem, because interface overhead is negligible.
It's surely interesting technology with positive impacts in a lot of areas but is it that the important part of the experiment? Humans need keyboards and mice to interface with computers, computers don't (lucky them.)
Sorry to insist on that analogy, but it looks to me as if my car should be able to fit my shoes and walk before I admit that it goes to another city quicker than me walking.
When you're trying to individually blink 30 stalkers at the perfect time they have almost 1 hp - latency is everything.
Camera has latency. Depending on various factors it takes even milliseconds of exposure for camera to gather enough light that it registers as a clear image frame. Human eye works on a different basis, but also isn't instant. You cannot cut that in software, human player cannot train to lower this. But AI doesn't need to do it - it has image provided as a memory buffer.
Image recognition has latency (both in the brain and in computer). Even as simple stuff as recognizing where the computer screen is as opposed to the background. It takes time. AI doesn't need to do it.
Muscles (engines in robot hands) have latency.
Mouses and hands have inertia and can't be moved instantly - have to be accelerated and stopped and even if you have optimal algorithm to be 100% accurate - it takes time.
It's not only hard to implement, it's also physically IMPOSSIBLE to do without introducing significant delays.
AI that is controlling the ui directly doesn't have to deal with most of these tasks, so it has a huge advantage in a game like starcraft. It's not that AI is so much better, it's that AI is high-frequency trading and human player is sending requests to buy/sell by telefax. By the time your request is processed the other guy had opportunity to do 10 different things.
If you want to focus on the part of the job that is doable now - sure, go ahead. But then don't abuse the unfair advantages you have and announce you "won". It's very low threshold to win in starcraft when your opponent has effectively 100 times the lag you do.
I'm sure someday we will have AI that can beat human player in starcraft without abusing this advantage, And I'm pretty sure the fastest way to this isn't to put a real robot in front of a screen, but it's to limit the intraface bandwidth of the AI to be on the similar level as that of human players.
> Sorry to insist on that analogy, but it looks to me as if my car should be able to fit my shoes and walk before I admit that it goes to another city quicker than me walking.
Let's remove the roads that we made specifically for cars and speak about this again :) Will your car move you through an untamed wilderness quicker than your legs? Possibly. Or not at all.
If I walk into a bullet train, slowly walk inside it, and walk out of it at the end of the route I will be even faster than the fastest car. Is it fair to say I'm faster than a car? After all it's not my fault the car doesn't fit inside that bullet train :)
We need to compare apples to apples, and comparing AI that doesn't need to deal with half the sources of latency with a human player that does, in a game where latency is very important - just isn't fair.
You could make an AI which tries to hack the human computer to force a leave. That would also constitute a "win". Or one which hacks its own computer and displays "You win" immediately. Or one which tries to kill the human player, if we want to be really dramatic about it.
hooking it up to a camera looking at a screen and a robot arm with a mouse would be more fair though.
edit: ok they did have a camera version, but i still want a robot arm.