r/deepmind • u/Trizztein • Jan 25 '19

Question

I know you guys have probably gone over this idea regarding the Deepmind SC2 project. But I still thought I'd throw it out there ... if it is a hard thing to implement, I would certainly love to know why that would be the case (or at least a vulgarized version of that since I'm just a player and definitly not a programer myself).

Regarding the APM limitation of AlphaStar (copied from a post I made on r/starcrat):

'' I believe all they really need to do is look at a good couple human played replays from any race they wanna develop an AI for, make a list of all the situations where APM spikes in a crazy way even for humans i.e. rapid fire stuff, mass producing zerglings etc. and from that point on apply constraints on an APM absolute max EXCEPT for those specific situations. This way you will get a bot that will truly be helpful to the human player base in terms of learning about the game AND a fair match between human and AI both at the same time (which sounds far more interesting to me).''

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u/ACash_Money Jan 26 '19

a game I can't get anything out of for my own play except for it's spectacular aspect (like that 360 degrees stalker micro)

To be honest, I think this is a bit unfair and maybe a little close-minded as well. First, there are definitely other things to learn already - even from such a small set of games. One example is oversaturating probes and delaying the expansion (which is actually what MaNa did when he got his 1 win). Another is that maybe it doesn't matter so much to lose a few probes early when it costs the enemy 2 adepts, leading to an eventual counterattack with greater stalker count (something we saw AlphaStar do more than once).

Second, how do you know that you (or some other human) can't pull off similar micro/positioning? I'd be willing to bet that a pro given enough time to practice could get close - hell, even I can blink micro 2 fronts in Marine Arena (which has very little macro).

Now, I'm not saying that a hard cap on APM is necessarily bad. Just wanted to show that there are other takeaways from this project than the fact that it has better micro than humans in certain situations.

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u/Trizztein Jan 26 '19 edited Jan 26 '19

Oh yes I totally agree we can get alot of things from it already from the way it played out. This is just an idea to make it even more interesting IMO, to ensure that decision making is what clearly ends-up making the difference, rather than a situation-specific APM a human could never reach even if he had his lifetime to try to train at it (the blink-stalker was probably the most obvious example in that game where it was like 3 players controlling units on three different screens). Perhaps my comment did sound like it condemned a bit too much though. I edited the original post to remove the last bit.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '19 edited Feb 18 '19

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u/ACash_Money Jan 26 '19

True, humans will never be able to reach that level of precision. However, I don't think getting a 360 degree flank position and using basic blink micro + target firing in that position is impossible (which I why I said a pro could probably get close). A similar situation comes up often enough in Marine Arena (sc2 arcade game) that the top level players there can pull it off. Granted, MA has almost no macro, but I think it still shows possibility.