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Comment by missosoup | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure this is unfairness. IIRC they put in a fair bit of effort to put it on a level playing field with humans by limiting APM and not allowing it to observe multiple areas simultaneously by spam moving the camera.

It might have some minor unfair advantage in terms of being able to click with pixel perfect accuracy, but they're marginal and from watching this project evolve, it's pretty clear that the strategic planning aspect of alphastar has indeed become better than humans.

"Agents were capped at a max of 22 agent actions per 5 seconds, where one agent action corresponds to a selection, an ability and a target unit or point, which counts as up to 3 actions towards the in-game APM counter. Moving the camera also counts as an agent action, despite not being counted towards APM."

This is worse micro than top human players.

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Wasn't blink stalker micro pretty central to its playstyle as protoss, the race it was best at? Why would you say that is minor and marginal?

That was from the version of AlphaStar that they demo'd in the earlier show matches. From what I gathered in the articles over the last few days, they took in a lot of feedback from that and adjusted this to make strategies like that inhuman blink micro less possible...

It can no longer do micro like that, I have watched most of its games several times and it never did any micro feat like that again. On the contrary its micro was often lacking compared to humans, it won mostly through very strong timing attacks and uncanny ability to pick when to fight.

> It can no longer do micro like that

Is that supposed to be an intention in design? I'd figure an AI could easily outplay a human if that weren't the case, given its inherent advantages (e.g. better accuracy, the ability to instantaneously prioritize which units to blink in/out).

For example, [this](https://youtu.be/pETcAm82vXU?t=322) game is one example where an AI could perform even better using such tactics.

EDIT: another commenter mentioned it would make the game too unfair, so it was an intention in design.

Just as an example of how extremely unfair it would end up being, flawless AI micro looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs

100 zerglings vs. 20 siege tanks. Without insane micro the zerglings barely kill 2 siege tanks. With insane micro the 100 zerglings mop up the whole army with ease.

It's fascinating & fun to watch, but if your goal is to make an AI that can out-think a human it's super not useful, either.

"... the strategic planning aspect of alphastar has indeed become better than humans."

This is not true. Top-level human players take into account who their opponent is, what builds they've used in recent games, their proclivities, strengths, and weaknesses. In a 7-game match they'll intentionally use builds which (in order to deceive) appear the same but have very different effects.

AlphaStar has better strategy than other AIs, but that's a low bar. My young son has better strategic appreciation of the game, and easily points out the difference between good strategy and AlphaStar's next-level micro.

They may be marginal but at this level of competition the margins are where the differentiation lies.

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