If they're not limiting AlphaStar's TTFA, then it can respond instantly to problems all over the battlefield, which is superhuman in an uninteresting way.
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 ;)
Has it? I'm not a RTS player but I thought that simple bots couldn't compete with top StarCraft players just with speed. It required strategy plus speed to first become competitve (though less strategy than required with slow APM and TTFA).
One such video (skip to about 4:30 for opinions on mechanics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP9F-AZezCU
The original commenter's remarks about TTFA seems to be equivalent to what I'm referring to.
Relevant reading: https://www.alexirpan.com/2019/02/22/alphastar.html
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-...
That may be true in some narrow technical sense, but it was heavily disputed by the StarCraft community. If you watch the exposition games, AlphaStar has superhuman ability to micro-control its units one-by-one during critical battles, which allowed it to beat its human opponents even when its army was far inferior on paper.
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).
Stalkers have a player operated ability to instantly move a short distance 'blink' once every 5 seconds. When in a fight, you optimally let the stalker(s) taking damage soak up as much damage as possible and then blink them backwards so they can recharge shields and continue firing from behind other stalkers. They don't stop firing, so all the work the opposing force did trying to kill a shooter, resulted in no outcome at all.
That functionality is balanced by the fact it is hard for a human to time activating the abilities of many stalkers at once in time with the damage they are taking and perform the many other actions the game requires at the same time.
Alphastar can perfectly blink back stalkers with limited apm because timing things is obviously not a problem for it, making stalkers way more value-for-money than they should be and can hold off high investment attacks more cost effectively. Ultimately sc2 is a game of economy and timing so this small change gives a massive advantage.
What made its micro different was that it did it consistently from flanks on several sides of an army exceeding the boundaries of a human screen. It was also notable that it did that while macroing at home, but some macro actions during intense micro is done among better pros.
The blink micro advantage should be far reduced if Alphastar is playing the same StarCraft II installation as humans now.
If you believe Aleksi Pietikäinen -- and pretty much every one of the professional players who played against it -- the claim you're repeating here is so misleading as to be fairly considered an intentional lie on the part of the deepmind team.
For example, TLO's inflated APM are presented in that chart without comment. Specifically, without the comment that his high APM counts come from a particular game context in which holding the mouse button down (i.e. a single click with a duration) is counted by the game as thousands of APM.
https://blog.usejournal.com/an-analysis-on-how-deepminds-sta...
AlphaStar APM spiked to ridiculous inhuman levels during stalkers micro. On top of that, it controlled units that were screens apart at the same time, which is not supposed to happen.
DeepMind's refusal to aknowledge it, on top of the sketchy and misleading TLO chart didn't do them any favor.
Reference? I'm under the impression that the game provides several "layers of information" directly to AlphaStar, not the actual screen.
> Q. How does AlphaStar perceive the game?
> A. Like human players, AlphaStar perceives the game using a camera-like view. This means that AlphaStar doesn’t receive information about its opponent unless it is within the camera’s field of view, and it can only move units to locations within its view. All limits on AlphaStar’s performance were designed in consultation with pro players.
Your assumption us correct about the show matches against MaNa and TLO that many people are talking about in here. That was not the long term goal of the Alphastar team to keep it on that heavily modified version of the game. For one thing, it meant that Alphastar needed a customized version of the game that it couldn't play on the ladder. As far as an AI challenge goes, it's also really weak if the AI gets more direct access to game data than its human opponents.
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.
If you watch the first-person view of top human professionals it already looks pretty instant or "mechanical," and is sometimes hard to follow for me even as a semi-competent player and avid spectator. What's the TTFA for a pro when an enemy drop appears on the minimap? I would guess somewhere around 200ms at the quickest? That would be similar to the latency of the DeepMind neural network (supposedly 350ms). And, of course, Starcraft 2 already has an approximate input latency of 200ms (so that all players can receive all other players' inputs and run them against their game state).
At the end of the day I don't see pure reaction speed as being a huge issue in Starcraft 2. Perhaps it would give a computer an "unfair" advantage in some rare cases like two cloaked ghosts running into each other and trying to snipe each other.
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://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs?t=1460
TLDR: Both their APM and TTFA is comparable to human pros.
> AlphaStar has built-in restrictions, which cap its effective actions per minute and per second. These caps, including the agents’ peak APM, are more restrictive than DeepMind’s demonstration matches back in January, and have been applied in consultation with pro players.
So yeah, they've tweaked this specifically, although not much details as to how.