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Comment by pyrophane | Hacker News Reader

Can you provide an explanation of what you said for those of us who don't know much about Starcraft or competitive RTS games?

I find what you said interesting but I lack the context to understand it.

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AlphaStar played 11 games. In 10 of those games, it played in a mode where it didn't have to manage the camera, so it didn't have to context-switch between things going on in different parts of the map, the way a human would. It won all 10 of those games, using a strategy which a human would not have been able to pull off. In the 11th game, it played with the same camera restrictions a human would have. It lost that game.

The game where Mana won seemed to be primarily because he discovered an exploitable maneuver against the AI.

Yes, AlphaStar was already up 15 workers -- "build a Phoenix" would have completely shut down the prism and is apparently something that particular agent never learned how to do properly.

Camera management isn't part of that equation.

Though it is fair to conjecture that Mana may have won the earlier Blink Stalker vs Immortal game, if camera management were required.

Depends. If camera management soaked up a large share of the training capacity of the network, then that might explain why it failed to learn how to handle drop-harrassment.

The computers see and can click the whole battle field and the humans have a view port at a specific area. Star Craft is very micro oriented (give orders in real time to units rather than just clicking attack and wait), so the computers have a huge, unfair, advantage in being able to see everything at once and micro everywhere at once and react faster on emerging enemy units, since they are always looking everywhere.

Zooming out for a human player would be considered cheating. It would be easier to see hit and run attacks and react in time etc.

A lot of these are glorified and complicated "rock paper scissors" games. Each race has a set of units, some air, some land. Most can attack anything but others are specialized and can only attack land or air. Some have really long range, but other hindrances to balance them.

Yes this is a mass simplilfication of the game. There is a lot to resource management and production capacity to train/build/grow/call in more troops.

I cannot speak to the competitive side of it.

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