As much as I love brood war, great micro over a large number of units with wide awareness (things which appear to be easy to AlphaStar) would be ridiculously overpowered, even with completely average strategy. Brood War is an awesome game because it's constantly asking too much of its players at all times. I can't imagine games against an AI which has far more attention and micro to give would be too interesting.
They are planning on limiting the APM of the AI anyway. With BW, you can focus on an AI learning basic strategy with incomplete information. With SC2, you mix in a hole assortment of figuring out how crazy abilities like force fields and recall. It's going to take much longer for an AI to anticipate when its opponent is going to force field the ramp and warp into the main.
> They are planning on limiting the APM of the AI anyway.
They did that in these games. (Or at least, it didn't abuse absurdly high APM.)
It still had insane micro a) because it had a FoV which basically extended to the combined FoV of all if its units[1] rather than having to move a screen-size FoV, and b) when it micros it never really "misclicks" like a human would do under pressure.
(This was most obvious in how it could micro against MaNa's army on 3 fronts in game 4 and how it was able to basically perfectly drain the Immortal barriers in the game where MaNa actually should have been able to defend against a human mass stalker build ~100% of the time.)
One thing they weren't clear on was how it could tell how much health, etc. each enemy unit had -- did it have to spend an "action" (like a player would have to click) to do that? If so, then that's even more insane in terms of micro ability.
Anyway, disagree about BW. Perfect micro in BW is possibly even more devastating than in SC2, IMO, because there are all these weird glitches that you can do -- the best players can do them some of the time, but no players can do it perfectly all of the time.
[1] This was not the case for the final game which it lost.
>It still had insane micro a) because it had a FoV which basically extended to the combined FoV of all if its units[1] rather than having to move a screen-size FoV, and b) when it micros it never really "misclicks" like a human would do under pressure.
This is an oversight that I imagine they will eventually fix as well. Doesn't make sense to allow the AI to do this, because the focus is on the AI understanding the game.
>Anyway, disagree about BW. Perfect micro in BW is possibly even more devastating than in SC2, IMO, because there are all these weird glitches that you can do -- the best players can do them some of the time, but no players can do it perfectly all of the time.
I didn't mention micro specifically, I mentioned abilities. The perfect micro issue can again be solved by limiting the AI's APM. They may be able to execute micro tricks, but not constantly.
Once machines exceed normal human play, further research does not focus on trying to make the machines play badly so that it's fun to face humans again. What ever would be the point of that?
Instead we just watch the machines versus other machines.
This is why we didn't see "AlphaZero plays chess versus grand master" games - they'd be dull, A0 wipes the floor with grand masters because it's an AI and grand masters aren't, boring.
But lc0 and similar have been entering computer chess competitions with (a clone of) the Google Alpha Zero design. It does pretty well.
Just as with TAS in speed running, you get a synergy. On the one hand, the machines play a distinctly different game, perfect on its own terms, a TAS run never succeeds in a frame perfect trick on the second or third try, always the first - the AI will never mis-blink a stalker to a pointless death. But human play continues, not against the machine but parallel to it, and learning from it. Golden Eye speedrunning was hugely influenced by TAS findings. Modern human chess is influenced by the machine chess play styles.
Are you so sure? APM limits on the AI aren't necessary, which is a real insight FTA:
>In its games against TLO and MaNa, AlphaStar had an average APM of around 280, significantly lower than the professional players, although its actions may be more precise. This lower APM is, in part, because AlphaStar starts its training using replays and thus mimics the way humans play the game.
Where does it say the APM spiked during battles? If it's using it head-to-head with the human player, then that's bad, but how do you know it's not just herding workers and units individually?
I get the analogy but based on the distribution, 75% of the APM for alphastar is below the mean of APM for the human during gameplay. Following that analogy, both cars are on the racetrack, except one is applying acceleration with more precision - i.e. accelerating out of a turn rather than always accelerating. Capping acceleration wouldn't matter in this case.
The APM maxed out at 1500 at one point, far in excess of any human, especially considering many human actions are meaningless actions or spam clicks. The AI could win based on inhuman micro with stalkers and blink. I would be far more interested in seeing the agent with a fully realistic camera and fully realistic apm limit.
It does make a difference, because if the APM spike is during a head-on interaction with the human then it provides a competitive advantage, if it's randomly during another part of the match, then it doesn't provide a competitive advantage.
I'm not really sure why you think Brood War is such a pure example of basic strategy without difficult to comprehend mechanics. Even in your example, recall is far crazier in Brood War. Arbiters can also create a version of a force field on a ramp that's uncounterable and lasts far longer. They're also harder to defend against because they have so much HP.
The fact that arbiters are stronger or weaker than the equivalent abilities in SCII isn't the issue. The issue is getting the AI tech to the point where it can figure out that you have to sac a base because it will waste time sending your army there only to have them recall is going to take a lot longer. An AI can figure out that there is an arbiter on the map, and that means there is a potential for it to recall some units into your base. That's easy.
BW isn't the perfect example or pure strategy, but there are dramatically less game-changing abilities in it. Think cyclone/marauder cheeses or 2 base warp gate allins or ravagers seiging your wall. SCII in general makes attacks come quicker relative to scouting. Injects, chrono, and mules make tech and attacks come sooner compared to BW. Reliable scouting is still basically tier 2.
