DeepMind’s StarCraft II agent will play anonymously on battle.net

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_limitation

When trying to solve problems, if you add constraints in certain areas, you can sometimes come up with really creative solutions you wouldn't have thought of before.

That is also why amateur players copying pro-players can loose to a "weaker" unit combinations. Because when you do things at 50 actions per minute you will not get the advantages of certain unit types.

In the context of AlphaStar it was clearly visible in its first games. The AI chose ranged units and every commentator during that game was saying that AI has an inferior army. However when within the battle its APM were allowed to reach 1000 that type of unit became the best possible unit to have.

At 20%, no. Pro players beat other pro players with 20% more apm all the time, even if they pick reasonable unit comps (this is especially common when terran players do tank focus builds against zerg). At 200%, especially if it's effective and not spamming, maybe. There are videos of bots microing marines at very high apm to beat big baneling balls, which cost much more resources and are supposed to directly counter marines. Protoss players could have perfect blink micro or immortal dropping, etc.

Depends on the strategy, and the skill level you play as, and what that APM is being used for.

Among the lower 90% of play, a player with a very good understanding of strategy, and good prioritization of their actions (Spend money, don't get supply blocked, don't lose your army to a dumb blunder) will win ~100% of their matches with ~40 apm, assuming they plan to use a low-apm strategy (no fancy drop play, preference to units that don't require a lot of micromanagement.)

On the masters/pro scene, though, you need a lot of APM just to stay alive. When there's three medivacs cycling drop harass in your main and natural, while helions keep running into the worker line of your fourth base, while your opponent's army is jostling for position with yours, trying to get a good angle to land EMPs, or to siege up in a good position, you're not going to be able to physically stay alive, unless you are devoting over a hundred APM to dealing with these threats.

> If I have 20% more APM than you do I beat you even if I totally pick the wrong units and build order?

That depends on what 'the wrong units and build order' means.

Some build orders will straight up die to other build orders, assuming perfect play on both sides. Assuming non-perfect play, it depends on which mistakes are made by each side.

Some build orders are soft-countered by other build orders. They can, theoretically, hold against a 'countering' build order - but will die, if the person using them makes some mistakes, and their opponent makes none.

Likewise, 'the wrong units' is huge a bag of worms. Are zealots better units, cost-per-cost than marines? Yes, unless there's a critical mass of marines, at which point zealots become the 'wrong units' for that engagement. Throughout a game, there are ebbs and flows of strengths and weaknesses, between two players, as they hit their various tech timings/unit counts/positional advantages, and try to transform those short-term advantages into economic damage, or efficient army trades.

A big part of pro play is knowing when you have an advantage you can exploit, how much you can exploit it, how to exploit it efficiently. You need game sense for the first, good strategic thinking for the second, and APM for the third.

[1] I'm a pretty casual player, but I've had no problems hitting Master (5%) level in every season I've cared to play. I generally sit at ~90 APM, when I don't spam - and I presume that if I were much smarter, better with my timings, and more knowledgeable about the game, I could be in the 10th percentile with half the APM. The amount of extra game knowledge that pro players have, compared to me, is staggering.

Ketroc plays Master level Terran SC2. His APM is poor, he sometimes gets supply blocked, his micro isn't great. But his strategic understanding is excellent. Ketroc grasps exactly what's going on, and also how other players are paying the game, which leads to him winning at Masters level (not pro but very good) where most competitors have high APM.

Ketroc was famous in early SC2 for "that blue block is moving" a phrase from commentary of a game in which his opponent takes Ketroc's base but Ketroc's superior strategic understanding leads to an unconventional win.

Another way to formulate this is: if you made AS as broken as it could possibly be by micro, what macro strategies would humans have to discover to beat it?

SC2 is really about attention management- every action you take, like moving a worker to construct a building that you'll have money for in the future, takes time and attention, and good players will take the minimal action needed to get something done and then move their attention elsewhere while they wait (almost like CPU pipelining). This is why players will do runbys/drop harass at the same time as a big fight. It forces the defending player to spend more attention than the attacker, or risk losing key workers/buildings. APM is just a rough representation of the ability to multitask.

From this perspective, AlphaStar's APM doesn't really matter. If it can instantly understand and juggle different scenarios occuring on the map at the same time (scouting, macro, battles, drop defense), that immediately puts it at an advantage, and many pro level strategies rely partially on pressuring the opponent until they make a mistake.

The high level strategy stuff exists on top of all this, and that's what makes SC2 so difficult. AlphaStar is really impressive, but once it understands the game at some level, I think it's inevitably going to be better than human players. Human players are going to get wins off AlphaStar by forcing tactical errors in weird scenarios, but it's not going to look like typical human games.

It outmicroed MaNa (one of the most micro-focused protoss players) in several games, attacking and winning from positions it shouldn't be possible to do so. In one game it countered MaNa's big immortal-archon army with pure blink stalkers. The general consensus is that immortal-archon is the ultimate counter to stalkers :) The bot was doing perfect blink stalker micro from 3 sides of MaNa army at once over an area that was like 3-screens wide.

It would be physically impossible for a human player to play like this, because moving the screen to blink each stalker as it gets near 0 hitpoints back and forth just can't be done fast enough, with 50 stalkers fighting - but for a bot it's easy.

After these games they limited the alphastar to have limited speed of moving the camera, and that bot lost to MaNa (but it was also trained for less time so it might be not a good comparison), and MaNa strategy was a little cheesy in that game - harrasing with warp prism making the bot move his army back and forth.

Starcraft 2 is as much a strategy game as a mechanical arcade game, different mechanical restrictions change which strategies work well vs which other strategies. The balance of the game is designed with human limitations of micro in mind, so when a bot plays it has to imitate these restrictions, or the game isn't fair.

With perfect micro mass marines beat everything with ridiculous cost-effectiveness.

Thing is, you are probably going to pick units that require more APM. Some units like the blink stalker really benefit from micro-management if you can do them quick enough. If you have enough APMs to juggle 5 or 6 immortals out of 2 warp prisms, you have a huge advantage even in front of an opponent with a superior strategy.

And in the previous rounds, AlphaStar did have heavy APM limitations but they were criticized a lot because they allowed for very high APMs bursts. Being able to perfectly micro-manage engagements of 20+ blink stalker is going to do the equivalent of doubling your unit count.

The other thing that differs from a human is that as the APM increases, the precision can suffer. Humans will misclick, will fail to select all the units they want, etc... AlphaStar will not because it essentially sees Starcraft as a turn-based game and can react perfectly to each tick.

> Could a super smart bot win against pro's even if it's limited to 20% less APM?

AlphaStar cheesy game against Mana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKX6AcgFOZU) convinces me that yes. It already happened, with a very creative strategy and adaptation.

Ignoring APM - what if it turns out that the better of two players isn't the one who makes better strategic decisions, but the one who can issue more effective tactical commands in a short burst? We can't measure that as it isn't APM but it is likely to be a huge factor. StarCraft AI have historically been handicapped by being unable to model tight tactical situations - if machine learning can come up with any model at all that works (and we now know it can) computers are simply so much better at making quick decisions that there is little left to see that is interesting. There isn't much left to prove.

I wouldn't so much talk about APM, as about time-costs of information.

In real-time games like Starcraft, you have to spend time to look around the map and figure out what's changed in each area since you last saw it. The more of this "espionage" you do—and the longer it takes you to absorb what you see—the less time you can dedicate to actually doing things, making APM matter more and more.

This—presumably—won't be a problem for AlphaStar, though, because with a limited APM, it will be able to process the information it receives far faster than it will be allowed to emit actions. Think of it like a robot that could read (and absorb!) a book by just flipping through the pages at speed. If AlphaCraft only needs to just slide their viewport across the whole map as fast as the client allows scrolling to happen, in order to learn everything about what's going on, then the time cost of their information is very low, so their APM is basically irrelevant. They have all the time in the world to do whatever they like.

I'm looking forward to the presumptive second stage (AlphaStarZero? ZeroStar?) where the AI will train by playing itself. Because both sides would have equal APM potential, there's no reason to limit APM in that case. And, therefore, the game becomes a much more real equivalent to a normal StarCraft match, because once again the AI is put in a situation where the other player is reacting quickly-enough to their actions than they have to weigh "time spent learning what happened" against "time spent performing actions of their own based on incomplete information."

People in the comments made points about "perfect timing" and "management of focus" and I concur wholeheartedly.

It would be interesting to see how the AI distributes it's views if it were capped in some significant way.

Also, can the bot only issue commands on one screen at a time?

For instance, imagine you’re playing a chess game with a 100 ms timer and first to exhaust their timer loses. No human will win and I could create a program that could best Kasparov trivially by advancing each pawn. There’s the game and then the input layer problem.

Maybe Civilization IV ;)

Edit:

Alphastar does already factor out reaction time:

“We measured how quickly it reacts to things,” Silver said. “If you measure the time between when AlphaStar perceives the game. From when it observes what’s going on, then has to process it, and then communicate what it chooses back to the game. That time is actually closer to 350ms. That’s on the slow side of human players.” https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/24/alphastar-deepmind-beats-...

Even so, this latest version has max APM limits instated to appease pro-players. Since Alphastar is forced to perceive the state of the game through machine vision of the screen, it's reaction time is already on par with humans anyways (~350 ms for Alphastar vs. ~250 ms for humans).

Not necessarily true. Yes, the machines are faster, but sometimes that is not a good thing: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.09765.pdf

Knowing speed runners and the like, I can imagine they will quickly find a way to determine if the player is in fact DeepMind via some sub milisecond method.

Because in the real world, you have to get a bunch of sensor data, potentially run it through it's own neural net to recognize objects, and then feed it into the decision making system. All that takes time - most likely much more time than the 1 frame it takes for the AI to make an API call.

If the AI actually played through the same interface as humans, i.e. it simply gets the rendered image as an input, and produces mouse/keyboard inputs as an output, then maybe we should disable artificial APM/reaction time limits. But as it stands now, the AI has an absolutely massive advantage simply due to using a much better interface, which it won't have in the real world.

This is how APM is treated in the professional scene as well. Everyone knows that bursts of 500 APM when you're spamming at the beginning of the game aren't some incredible display of skill. But sustaining a good number of useful actions per minute is incredibly important, and a huge part of the mental process in Starcraft 2 is constantly deciding where and how to invest your actions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmOOrh5lq7o

This game was made 15 years ago and every time you play the game (just like the guy says) the encounters are different. There are ways to cheese the game still but it isn't easy to do it and tbh it almost not worth doing.

I think the problem is that a lot of games have been constrained by two things consoles being quite limited compared to PCs and the industry trying to constantly sell graphics and celebrity voice acting over gameplay.

Most of the open world games except for GTA are essentially pretty stale.

For a FPS like doom its trivial to make a "perfect" AI that never misses.

Much of the focus is on RTS though. (Real time strategy - like starcraft)

It's a little difficult to describe but practically the "quality" of a AI is very obvious to seasoned players. i.e. You feel this & there is no masking the truth easily.

e.g. AI opponent nukes my bases where maximum damage is inflicted. Meanwhile I know the AIs scouts didn't have visibility of that area. There is no way the AI could have legitimate know that's where to place the nuke for max effect.

The AI won. It didn't outsmart me. It cheated via being omniscient and having full sight of map while I'm constrained by "fog of war".

Excellent AI - killed me. Yay.

Bad game. Bad experience. Unhappy user.

Shoutout to the Queller AI mod on planetary annihilation with titans.

So presumably it will get the same info you or I could get from the minimap (presence of units in a particular area but no details as to what) + detailed information about anything in its camera-like view. This will have some effect on how the bot manages its APM budget, since it now needs to consider camera management.

But honestly, from the perspective of the Alpha research, getting information from the pixels probably isn't an interesting problem. They can pretty safely assume that they could build a Computer Vision setup that could get the same info that the API gives, given enough time + GPU horsepower.

Any possible inaccuracy/delay that might result from using Computer Vision instead of the API can be simulated. You could add a response delay (already in AlphaStar), or a random chance that the API delivers incorrect information from time to time (which I don't think they do).