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Comment by a_wild_dandan | Hacker News Reader

Here's a graph of AlphaStar's APM versus a professional player's: https://i.imgur.com/TXeLkQK.png Evidently AlphaStar also has a similar Economy of Attention (where the player focuses) to a professional player, at around 30 screens per minute. Additionally, AlphaStar's reaction time is around 350ms, a significant disadvantage over a pro.

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.

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I watched all of the event live and I feel that that graph is deceptive. If a game is 15 minutes and has 3 main battles lasting 15 seconds each, and you use 100 average APM on non-battle time and 1000 APM during battles, your average APM will be 145 but you obviously have a superhuman advantage.

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.

TLO seems to have a longer tail than AlphaStar in that graph though, so doesn't that imply that TLO peaked at an even higher APM, presumably during battles?

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

Yes,could that bug be the reason for the AI getting to 1000APM?

TLO is a Zerg player, so he probably does a lot more errors when playing Protoss. Also, every top player estimates when to do a sequence of actions and spams it a few times to maximize the chance of execution. Meanwhile Alphastar only has to do that once.

Hm, should be interesting to force the AI to use input commands through a "filter", where it can only execute orders with human level precision. And something similar for input.

This graph is incredibly deceptive and I'm kind of upset they posted it. There are about 10-15 seconds of gametime where APM is incredibly important, and the AI boosted to 1000+ APM during those periods. During lulls it cruised at ~30 APM.

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).

How can it do 1000 APM if if its reaction time is 350ms? (180/minute)

I believe you are conflating latency and throughput. It might take AlphaStar 350ms to perceive a threat, but once perceived, it might issue many commands at high speed to respond.

Latency != Bandwidth

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