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Comment by ionforce | Hacker News Reader

> But most surprising is that it didn't make any "breathtaking" moves or actions, as opposed to AlphaGO.

I don't play any competitive StarCraft so my view might be moot but I was surprised at the number of siege tanks it uses. It made me wonder if there's some critical advantage to having so many tanks stacked up in a line so that the splash is spread out.

Also I find it weird that it did not build any marauders at all, in any of the games I've seen.

And just in general, no sexy units. No battlecruisers, no infestors, no swarm hosts...

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>Also I find it weird that it did not build any marauders at all, in any of the games I've seen.

This is off-topic, but I was thinking about this the other day - couldn't AI be used to balance a competitive game in this sense? Imagine that the AI becomes so good that human players very rarely win against the AI in a best of 7 series. Then we find out that AI doesn't ever build a specific unit. That would be a pretty strong indicator that said unit isn't good enough compared to the rest.

You wouldn't be the first person to say this. But it only proves that the unit isn't useful __ as piloted by AlphaStar __.

Based on the initial AlphaStar against TLO/Mana, you would think that Stalkers are insanely OP and the only thing worth building.

I (and others) have wondered that if you continue to lower AlphaStar's APM, you would see a diversity of units. The money would be in where AlphaStar decides to spend its really tight APM budget. Is it worth casting that Psionic Storm?

I personally feel like it has an insane micro advantage by being able to select arbitrary units on the battlefield, as opposed to dragged squares or control groups. But I'm not a pro gamer, so I don't know what that feels like.

You can also do this directly with metrics on human games. It’s something that I know wizards of the coast does with Magic the Gathering decklists, just counts the copies of cards and keeps track of the “conversion rate” of them (how likely is this deck to pass some threshold, like have a positive win percentage, given that it has this card). They are doing it primarily to spot ban targets (the paper aspect of cards means you can buff without printing a new set of cards), but it is the same idea.

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