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It’s worth mentioning the huge advantage that impossible dropship or blink micro can give. It isn’t raw apm, but perfect timing sometimes that is an issue. The management of attention is truly important

Sounds like the AlphaStar team should add some randomized jitter lag between when Alphastar issues a command and it’s executed. Would make it learn more robust strategies that were less dependent on perfect timing, and might look more like a human player.

I'm not sure how you can write all that and still say APM doesn't matter. It's clear that in order to pull off simultaneous events while juggling macro and micro, you need sufficient APM. Being a pro means you know how to manage APM, which is essentially a limited resource, while accomplishing what you set out to do. If APM is no longer a limited resource, that removes another constraint on how you play and what you can do in the game.

What he means is that even if the computer controlled at an amateur level of about 100APM, it might still defeat a pro that plays at 300APM, if it spends those 100APM more wisely. In theory it might be easier for a computer to manage multiple fronts than it is for a human. It doesn't need more APM for that.

More APM does not mean you have more attention to spend, it means you have better micro at the position you are currently spending it.

I'm pretty sure that if an AI would perfectly spread 100APM over three fronts, it would already play at pro or close to pro level.

If it plays at 3000APM, which it could do, it would beat pro's just because of micro which is less interesting.

You're going into a lot of mental gymnastics over this, which just shows how crucial APM is. There's quite simply a minimum APM required to micro, macro and handle multiple fronts at a sufficiently good level. And it's not 100 APM. And the more APM you have to spare, the more your possible decision space grows on tactical and strategic levels. Hell, the previous AlphaStar matches show what kind of ridiculous things can be done with 1000 APM. It's not just some magical number. Your armies become more effective the more APM you have.

I think the point of disagreement between you and the other commenters is a subtle equivocation over the meaning of APM, something I've found to occur not infrequently in discussions around a metric.

You seem to be talking about an underlying, unknown parameter for which APM provides a crude estimator. When you use the term APM as a proxy for that hidden parameter, people will often mistake your position for claims about the raw number they see on screen, which does not perfectly correlate with the desired attribute.

In the case of APM, there are two major sources of error that make it a less-than-ideal estimator:

1) Not all actions are counted by APM. Moving the camera, moving your eyes to look at the mini map/minerals/supply counts/unit health, moving the mouse without clicking anything, pressing hot keys for targetable actions without confirming a target; these are all things which are not reflected in APM.

2) Many redundant actions are recorded as APM. Ordering a unit to move to one location and then clicking again in the exact same spot is a big one. Same goes for repeatedly selecting and deselecting groups of units without issuing any commands.

Given the above sources of error, it is not unreasonable to believe that a player with 40 APM can defeat a player with 400, it's just less likely.

The problem with extending this discussion to an AI is that the software does not suffer from these limitations. We can measure (and in fact control) the true number of actions the system uses to play the game. Unless programmed incorrectly, an AI should not waste any actions at all, so its measured APM won't be any higher than necessary. This makes it difficult to compare to a human player's APM.

> 1) Not all actions are counted by APM. Moving the camera, moving your eyes to look at the mini map/minerals/supply counts/unit health, moving the mouse without clicking anything, pressing hot keys for targetable actions without confirming a target; these are all things which are not reflected in APM.

Not all actions need to be.

> 2) Many redundant actions are recorded as APM. Ordering a unit to move to one location and then clicking again in the exact same spot is a big one. Same goes for repeatedly selecting and deselecting groups of units without issuing any commands.

The assumption here is that there is an end-all be-all metric for APM. It isn't. Just look at the discussions around EPM vs APM to get a taste. Anybody who thinks about APM understands that it isn't a 100% accurate measurement, and it just doesn't add anything to the conversation when everybody realizes that APM isn't 100% accurate.

Further, it's no accident that AlphaStar's APM has been limited, stemming from the kinds of advantages it provides in a game like SC2 where APM is a limited resource for every player such that it lays constraints on and is related to or is constrained by all kinds of things from attention to cognitive load to strategy to micro to macro. APM is itself a metric that's incredibly important to the game, not just a proxy. The fact that it's related to so many other parts of the game is just an indicator of how important it is.

Also, it's a big jump to say that all of AlphaStar's actions are effective and not wasted. At most you can say that there's no spam, because there's no need to. Pros will spam clicks just to keep their hands warm and moving, something which an AI doesn't need to do.

I'm saying DeepMind could be better at lower APM than a human could be. Which is cool because APM we see as a physical limitation, topping out at around 350 average iirc. If you go through a players 350 clicks, how many are good tactical decisions, how many are mediocre or bad ones and how many are just the player keeping tempo?

We don't know how our attention span is limited and how that relates to tactical planning.

I don't think APM is misleading. Your basic assumption is that computers are better at StarCraft than humans. The whole point of these experiments is to prove that. Or to see whether we are advanced enough to build such a computer.

The whole point of these APM shenanigans is to make sure that the competition is about intelligence, not interface. Even without any fancy technology at all, the computer starts out with a massive interface advantage. An API is just better that a screen and a mouse. It would be really cool if we could hook up a human brain to SC2, to give the human the same interface, but we can't. So we go the other way and limit the AI's Interface.

The final step in that would be to give the AI the same interface as the human, i.e. point a camera at the screen and connect a robotic arm to the mouse. But that just creates computer vision and robotics challenges, which are probably seen as a distraction at the moment.

But such a robotic arm would definitely have a limited APM, so the current approximations don't seem to bad to me.

I think it would be very interesting to keep the full map view, but then brutally limit the APM, within like a 1-2s window.

Limiting map vision seems a kind of arbitrary limitation to me, an artifact of the particular minimap size Blizzard chose that you can't change; you should be able to change its resolution, size and placement as you like, and then face the computer on roughly equal terms (without its ability to do ridiculous micro, i.e. try to produce pure strategy games).

You only need a few seconds of excess dexterity than your opponent to decisively win a game of SC2, the APM stuff is a big red herring.

You also need to be somewhat even during the whole game, though, corrected for race. If you play 10apm vs somebody at 200apm, they will be able to a move at the engagements even if your burst to 400apm because the difference in army size will be that large thanks to the differences in macro.

>> 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.

Then you could restrict the AI to a certain amount of memory that is available to it. You could also play with latencies/exactness of the memories that is available to it.