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Comment by CyberRage | Hacker News Reader

StarCraft is built in such a way that you can't create a perfect, 100% winrate agent.

Since there is hidden information, you could always miss a corner of the map where the enemy hidden some units and you lose the game.

Is Alphastar "perfect"? no. Is it better than 99.9% of all humans? absolutely.

You don't need to create a perfect agent in most cases, self driving a classic example.

If you were to deploy an agent that drives 95% better than all humans the effects would be huge.

It would still fail in some scenarios where professional drivers won't be it doesn't really matter because most people are not that.

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I know the bot will never have 100% winrate, but I think it shouldn't be able to be exploited (I.e. repeatedly beaten using the same strategy).

Let me give you an example [0]. When AlphaStar was playing on the ladder a player in Diamond league (~70-80th percentile) beat AlphaStar easily using mass Ravens. If you're not aware of the strategy, it's a turtle strategy where the player masses air units and is generally terrible.

But AlphaStar was confused by the strategy, and so it lost by a large margin.

Deploying an AI which can be exploited like this is asking for trouble.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/cgzieq/alphastar...

But that could be fixed technically. Deepmind's goal was not to create an "unexploitable" agent but to prove that ML algorithms can cope with complex, dynamic environments such as StarCraft.

It seems to you weird but the same agent probably wins against GM's most of the time. humans have weaknesses too.

The AI simply leans on its strengths just like humans do.

> It seems to you weird but the same agent probably wins against GM's most of the time. humans have weaknesses too

This is the whole problem though. AlphaStar beats GMs but can lose to weird strategies.

On the other hand, GMs will almost never lose (Most likely >99% winrate) to a Diamond player no matter how weird their strategies are.

The AI has strengths, but it also has glaring weaknesses. Imagine if you had an AI flying a plane and 99% of the time it was far better than a human pilot but 1% of the time it crashed and killed everyone. I would not fly on that plane.

Maybe a bunch more training data and time would solve this type of problem, but I'm skeptical.

You're beautifully showing the human nature which can be problematic in my opinion.

First of, no human player achieves 99% winrate against diamond players. there are many cheeses, one miss-step and you lose. GM's can lose to Diamond players.

Now for the main part, you're saying and I'm rephrasing here:

Even if the AI is statistically better than humans because it has some weaknesses I'm going to prefer the human.

But still at the end of the day, the AI does a better job on average and will be safer to use than human pilots!

We already heavily rely on software\algorithms for our most important things. all modern vehicles use electronic systems that monitor\manage several key components, stock market is heavily managed by bots.

If AI can do a significantly better job than human, I would choose the AI, even if it behaves strange in that 0.1% of cases. humans are not as reliable as you think.

> First of, no human player achieves 99% winrate against diamond players. there are many cheeses, one miss-step and you lose. GM's can lose to Diamond players

They definitely would. You underestimate the difference in skill. Top players almost always beat other GM players and maintain very high winrates in top GM.

See for yourself: https://www.nephest.com/sc2/?season=46&queue=LOTV_1V1&team-t...

> But still at the end of the day, the AI does a better job on average and will be safer to use than human pilots!

I agree, but only if that 1% or 0.1% or whatever is not exploitable by someone malicious.

The link includes players with vastly lower winrate and players with high winrates but for extremely low number of games.

We need sufficient quantities to claim 99% winrate, for highly ranked players even with 200 games(which is still a low number since a single loss can massively affect results) are not even close to 80% winrate. probably with enough games it will be even lower.

Maintaining 99% winrate is extremely hard as you can only lose a single game out of 100. people get tired, try new stuff, simply don't pay attention or just get caught off guard by a new thing.

As for "malicious exploitation", it does poses a risk in some environments but the question then becomes exactly the same.

Is the AI less exploitable than the average person?

If so, it doesn't matter.

> Is the AI less exploitable than the average person?

People are generally not exploitable in the same way an AI is because we can subjectively assess situations and learn on the fly.

This is a good example of why I think your argument doesn't hold water: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1372726911105855488

On the 99% winrate, I feel like you're either being purposefully obtuse or have no experience with competitive games.

Majority of the winrates are >70%, but even 60% is insane for a competitive game especially at the very highest level. It is ridiculously hard to maintain a winrate this high even over 30 games.

You seem to be thinking about this from a statistical perspective (I.e. moar samples) without realizing that this is baked into MMR (You're matched with opponents as close to your skill level as possible). These players have to maintain high winrates just to stay at this MMR because they can earn as low as literally 0 MMR for a win and lose up to 60 MMR for a loss.

These players are also around 3000 MMR higher than Diamond players. Using the Elo model [0], this equates to a 99.998% winrate.

100 games in a row is also not feasible. That's ~20 hours of playtime assuming 12min games.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/7fc30w/7_orders_...

This is the difference between memorizing a good strategy and thinking strategically. DeepMind does the former. It's still impressive. It will still beat humans. It may still be a route to successfully address many real world business problems.

But it's not as noteworthy as implied on the path to AGI.

> They definitely would. You underestimate the difference in skill. Top players almost always beat other GM players and maintain very high winrates in top GM.

A diamond player that has mastered one weird cheese will absolutely take more than one in a hundred games off a GM - even off a tournament pro. Even Serral chokes in way more than one in a hundred matches.

> First of, no human player achieves 99% winrate against diamond players.

Complete bullshit. You don't know the game at all if you believe this. The person you're arguing with is well known over on the Starcraft subreddits. Maybe listen to them.

In practice, hidden information cheeses simply aren't enough for a diamond to take a game off a top pro, even one time in a hundred. They'll sniff it out sufficiently and then just outcontrol the fight every time.

It is false that AlphaStar learns like humans do.

by any chance, do you know replay ID of this game ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di-yRj6TIK8

> StarCraft is built in such a way that you can't create a perfect, 100% winrate agent.

The worry isn't about perfect winrate, it's about finding strategies that can consistently cause the AI to lose over and over.

In a cooperative environment, a high percentage is great.

In a competitive environment, that .1% of scenarios where it's really weak will suddenly become the majority of games it faces.

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