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Comment by gambler | Hacker News Reader

From the paper:

>Humans play StarCraftthrough a screen that displays only part of the map along with a high-level view of the entire map, to e.g. avoid information overload. The agent interacts with the game through a similar camera-like interface

What exactly does that mean? Does it or does it not play by operating purely on image data human players would see on the screen?

How much of the system's interaction with game's interface is learned as opposed to hand-crafred and filtered through APIs?

It's amazing that most people here seem to think that system's ranking in a computer game are more important than its ability to learn from and interact with unstructured data.

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Everything about AlphaStar is typed and discrete. It has perfect inputs because it uses an API (and does not read pixel data).

Human limitations that AlphaStar shares:

- Data that requires the camera to see (e.g. enemy location, enemy HP)

- Inability to examine/target cloaked units

Possibly unfair, super-human things AlphaStar has access to:

- Instantaneous awareness of cloaked units

- Knowledge of things humans need to infer/click (e.g. upgrades)

- Global map awareness of unit positions (taking into account fog of war)

Definitely unfair:

- Can select arbitrary collections of units, including outside of camera view

Do you know if it can target a particular unit from a clump of air units? If yes, then there is another "unfair" thing.

Also I wonder how their "camera-like interface" works with tactics like fly a building above units to make them harder to target.

Yeah. I think watching it split a line of Stalkers into two flanks that isn't done with a rectangular selection is crazy unfair.

I think you're saying does it suffer from occlusion during selection. Based on how APIs typically work, I would say no it does not. So yeah that's another thing humans can't do. AlphaStar could hypothetically stack units into a singular mass and it would be discretely untargetable by human players.

It's meant to operate purely on data viewable on the screen to mimic a human player's experience and provide an even playing ground.

Can you cite something that confirms your assertion?

From what I'm reading in the paper, it sounds like there is some custom interface in play:

>AlphaStar can target locations more accurately than humans outside the camera, although less accurately within it because target locations (selected on a 256x256 grid) are treated the same inside and outside the camera.

It's really hard to parse what such statements mean. The fact that someone who is cited as a co-author of the paper approved the interface as "fair" isn't particularly reassuring.

> The fact that someone who is cited as a co-author of the paper

They are not just some random person, they were top SCII players. Who else if not them would know this well enough to make assumptions?

There is a custom interface in the sense that the bot does not read pixels from the screen - it reads the information through the API, same information that is usually presented on a screen. But the amount of information is limited to exactly what a human would see at the same time using the standard SCII interface.

Purely on image data.

From the article, they have a special interface, "developed in consultation with professional StarCraft II players and Blizzard employees". They are a bit vague on the details, but, for example, "Agents can also select sets of units anywhere, which humans can do less flexibly using control groups".

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