Another advantage was that the AI is just reading the game state through an API, it doesn't have to look on the screen. The game can be difficult to watch from a pro's perspective since they have to constantly click around the map to see what's happening, but the AI has perfect knowledge of everything it is capable of seeing, all without having to physically move a mouse to click on the screen.
If you watch the 11th game where pro player wins, (prior was a 10-0 shutout by Alpha), the AI actually lost because they rebuilt the agent to use the same forced camera perspective as the human - so there is absolute truth to this being a compelling advantage. It was able to micro multiple units in disparate areas by having far better spatial awareness. When they took that advantage away it seemed more even.
I don't know if we can absolutely claim that the limited viewport was the deciding factor in the 11th game, but it did seem to me that the Alphastar agent's blink stalker micro was somewhat compromised in that game compared to the seemingly superhuman blink micro in previous games.
It struggles with camera placement like real players :) And uses popular divert-attention tactics, which shows it understand that part of the game - for example when it sends oracles to mineral line at the same time as it attacks in front. Previous versions didn't do that, because they were taught playing vs cheating AI - so no point diverting attention of something that has instant access to any unit on the map :)
It also struggles to defend against adept harras beacuse it has "tunnel vision" - controls its oracle instead of defending probes at home. Mana actually managed his attention budget a lot better (this is a crucial pro-player skill in starcraft - harras is effective because it trades little of your attention for a lot of attention of the enemy, it's a skill that becomes irrelevant when opponent doesn't really have "attention" and can perceive and interact with all units on the map at once like previous version of alphastar).
This one is much more human, and much lower level. In my opinion it lost unfair advantage, so the mistakes in its errormaking are revealed. Previously it never was behind and never had to react to human player strategy - it rarely even scouted because what's the point - it wanted to build mass stalkers anyway.
Yeah, that's actually a huge point that I didn't even consider. Regardless of whether the AI itself is playing with a limited viewport, the fact that its opponent has a limited viewport opens up the opportunity to learn attention diversion tactics during the training process, which would otherwise be impossible.
What happens if a human tries to use the API with a custom UI of the human's own choosing? Such a UI might not exist yet, but are there ideas for more efficient UIs that could be built?
Yes I am curious of this too. What happens if the human has a giant TV screen that can see the whole map at once
Or, what if we slow down the game, so that the human can actually pause the game each second and consider what to do next. That's basically what the computer is allowed to do
Macro-wise, it would be like an unwieldly minimap which already exists so people can get a sense of where the enemy is moving. With a giant screen, information is not focused on a small area, so you are limited to your FOV. Minimap which shows unit strength in terms of armor hp or shields as well as placement would be ideal information.
Micro-wise, it would be like sitting in front of a giant text display looking at a whole book. You still have to focus on a small section to read it.
> Or, what if we slow down the game, so that the human can actually pause the game each second and consider what to do next. That's basically what the computer is allowed to do
While this would make it more fair, it would just make the micro game more similar to chess or go. I don't think humans would necessarily win in the end.
That's a good insight and yes, humans would probably be overpowered eventually. However, this is just the consequence of the fact that all games are similar if you remove external limitations such as reaction time (or, alternatively, produce a more efficient "being" which is not as subject to these limitations as some other).
Starcraft is like chess in some sense. The largest fundamental difference is that it isn't a perfect information game.
Tbh starcraft and dota shouldn’t really be the test games atm; turn based strategies (or rather, grand strategies) would be the far more appropriate evolution after chess and go, since we’re clearly more interested in AI macro than micro, and too much of its learning process is in trying to push the AI beyond micro-oriented thinking (probably many rounds of the AI tournament are lost simply because one AI found a new micro strategy to abuse)
But ofc, there’s no tbs or grand strategy currently out there with a real tournament scene, so you can’t really count on the devs implementing an AI-API, or even properly balanced / bug-free (far more user-testing goes into sc2/dota2 than say civ, simply by virtue of its playerbase).
Yes but a turn based game drastically reduces the action space compared to a real time game, something the DeepMind folks pointed out as a particularly interesting problem they wanted to tackle.
>a turn based game drastically reduces the action space compared to a real time game,
That's the primary benefit imo. The bigger action space is largely composed of non-strategic elements, at least in the sense of long-term strategies, eg micro and mini-skirmish tactics, that I don't think are as interesting. Ofc its clearly a conflict of interest, but my feeling was the most interesting aspect of Go/Chess is the AI making unintuitive discoveries that benefit the long-term. The human-collective machine is pretty good on its own at finding the shorter-term strategies; I don't think AI will make much significant impact in that space.
games as a medium to study upcoming real-world applications (eg cars), RTS makes sense; but as a medium to study AI beating humans, TBS is more appropriate (their ability to explore large search-spaces is far more interesting/potentially impactful). Studying both would be ideal ofc, but in a pick-one situation, TBS is better imo. But only RTS are even really viable atm, which is disappointing.
Even allowing players to zoom out would give huge advantages, that's why no matter the screen size you have to play at the same zoom. There was a bug at one point that allowed players to play multiplayer zoomed out and it was forbidden to use it in competetive games.
How about having multiple humans control the same faction, so one can focus on building, two on a couple of battle groups, another on scouting, etc.? Then they don't have to context switch nearly so much.
Aha, nice, thanks. Let's see, two players per side... not a huge number but probably a big step up from one. Looks like people aren't playing it much; some people suggest it's because that requires a partner.
I would like to see a setup akin to that of Ender Wiggin, with one commander overseeing and recommending overall strategy, and, say, five others managing different areas or groups. That seems like the way to get the best human performance, and might be enough to beat the AIs—at least to nullify chunks of their advantage.
Yeah, put an eye tracker in a pro and you'll see that the eyes are constantly changing the focus point, if you can watch the entire scene with the same precision without the need to focus on it you're already at a nice advantage.
As an aside, a few pro gamers prefer to play on windowed mode for exactly this reason.
Is the bit about reading the game through an api true? Earlier iterations of this same rl based agent that played Atari games would read just raw pixels not an api.
Yes, it’s true. A special PySC interface was created for AI. Also, it’s not only that AI doesn’t need to parse information available on much limited screen real estate but also that AI doesn’t have to use controller that have physical constraints. So AI has access to this super human controller and it can decide to click on one screen extreme and then another within 200ms.
Any game that is specifically going out of its way to support these ai’s will naturally do it through an api, though I’m only aware of dota2 and sc2 (sc:bw also does, through a community-modified client that serves the api, iirc). For adhoc games, eg atari, pixel-parsing is the natural result, but no one would intentionally set it up like that
