You play the game as it's written. Come back with another version of StarCraft that isn't so micro-intensive and we can see how the AI does on that.
Chess and Go don't have any form of micro and AIs are nevertheless dominant there.
I'd say, give AI development another year and I wouldn't expect there to be any kind of game, in any genre, that humans can beat AIs at. Whether it's Chess, Go, other classical board games, Civilization, MOBAs, RTSes, FPSs, etc.
> Chess and Go don't have any form of micro and AIs are nevertheless dominant there.
Yes, but chess and go have a tiny problem space compared to something like Starcraft. People want to see an AI win because it’s smart, not because it’s a computer capable of things impossible for humans. If the goal was perfect micro they could write computer programs to do that 10 years ago.
Then maybe we need a better game than StarCraft to test this on? Some kind of RTS that's less micro-heavy, perhaps? Maybe even an RTS where you can't give orders to individual units at all, like the Total War series? You can't fault the AI for winning at the game because of the way the game itself works.
Even if you limit the AI to max human APM, it's still going to dominate in these micro-heavy battles because it's going to make every one of its actions count.
> Even if you limit the AI to max human APM, it's still going to dominate in these micro-heavy battles because it's going to make every one of its actions count.
right, and we saw that with the incredible precision with stalker blink micro. There are many ways you could make it more comparable to humans. They have already tried that by even giving it an APM.
> You can't fault the AI for winning at the game because of the way the game itself works.
But it does make the victory feel hollow when it wins using a "skill" that is unrelated to AI (having crazy high APM with perfect precision because its a computer). Micro-bots have been around for decades, and they are really good. The whole point of this exercise is to build better AI, not prove that computers are faster then humans.
It would like if they wanted robots to try and beat humans at soccer, and the robots won because they shoot the ball out of a cannon at 1000 KPH. They win, but not really by having the skills that we are trying to develop.
I just can't help but feel that nothing AI does will ever be good enough according to this mindset, i.e. true "intelligence" is by definition things that computers cannot do.
Beating the world champion in Chess was, at one point, considered an impossible achievement for computers. Now it's considered so routine it doesn't even count as AI according to many. And in a few months when AlphaStar is beating top human players without having to use APM or viewport advantages, what will the next goalposts be?
The point is, it's like being impressed by a calculator because it can multiply two massive numbers faster than we can... no shit, that's the whole reason we use computers, because they calculate faster than we can...
There's nothing impressive in coding something that can execute something far faster than a human, or be so accurate and beat a human. There were Quake 3 bots that could wreck any human alive 10 years ago because they react in milliseconds and shoot you in the head perfectly. So what? It's obvious a computer can do that. It's like being surprised that a bullet beats a human in a fight, that's by design.
I would be impressed if a computer learned from scratch without knowing anything about the game beforehand, about the controls, or anything else, with ordinary human limitations. Using vision processors to look at a screen to see the inputs and controlling a physical mouse and keyboard. That would be impressive. But watching a computer do perfect blink micro at 1500apm is just underwhelming, since that isn't new tech, you could hand code that without deep nets.
> The point is, it's like being impressed by a calculator because it can multiply two massive numbers faster than we can
Yeah, exactly. And when calculators first came out, people were very impressed by them. They upended entire industries and made new things possible that had simply never been possible before with manual calculation. When you're pooh-poohing the entire computational revolution you might want to take a step back and reconsider your viewpoint. It only seems not impressive now because we were born in a world where electronic calculation is commonplace and thus taken for granted.
If you don't find this achievement impressive, then go look at some turn-based game where reaction time is eliminated entirely that computers still dominate at, like Chess or Go. The AIs are coming. Or give it a few months and they'll come back with a version hard-limited to half the APM of the human players and it'll still dominate. It's clear which way the winds are blowing on this. People who bet against the continued progress of game-playing AIs invariably lose.
> Or give it a few months and they'll come back with a version hard-limited to half the APM of the human players and it'll still dominate.
And this is exactly what is being argued here. Let's see that in particular, not a demonstration that computers are faster than humans. Of course they are. Whoever argued that, ever? This has been known and envisioned even before calculators were invented.
What people here are arguing with you for is that we want human-level limitations of the controls for the AI so it can clearly win by better strategy.
> I just can't help but feel that nothing AI does will ever be good enough
It can be good enough in a certain problem space, such as chess. But unlike chess or go, which are purely mental games, Starcraft has large physical component (vision, APM, reaction time). It can make it hard to determine when it has “mastered” this RTS. Like you said, it may be a few more months (years?) before AlphaStar can master Starcraft on “mental” level. The physical component is trivial for a computer, so mastering that is not much of a milestone.
Depending on how you define Chess, seeing the pieces and physically moving them is part of it as well. Chess-playing AIs haven't been required to have robot components because that's not the interesting part of the challenge of Chess. I'd argue the same is true of StarCraft, even more so, given that it's an innately computer-based game in a way that Chess is not. It seems arbitrary to require the presence of an electronic-to-physical bridge in the form of a robot only to then operate physical-to-electronic bridges in the form of a keyboard and mouse. Just let it run via the input devices directly. Give it some years and humans will be able to do this too.
In other words, this isn't an interesting handicap to apply.
> It seems arbitrary to require the presence of an electronic-to-physical bridge in the form of a robot only to then operate physical-to-electronic bridges in the form of a keyboard and mouse.
It's not at all arbitrary. SC2 match is won by a combination of reflexes and physical quickness with which the actions are executed, and strategy.
The whole point is to even the playing field in the area of the physical limitations so that only the strategy part is the difference. You know, the "Artificial INTELLIGENCE" part?
Is a AI that wins at Starcraft only because it has crazy high APM really going to help get to the next X? We could have built that 10 years ago. All it proves is that computers have faster reflexes then humans. That won’t help them become problem solvers for the future.
You seem to forget the way it learned to play every part of the game (not just micro fights). That is, not by having any developer code any rules, but simply by "looking" and "playing".
That's the great accomplishment and nothing like that could have been done 10 years ago.
What makes this interesting is if they can make a computer program better at Starcraft strategy then a human. How they did that is irrelevant. If having developers code rules makes a better AI then deep learning, then the former is the most impressive solution. What they did is a great accomplishment and the AI they created was amazing, but I feel like the faster-then-humanly-possible micro makes any accomplishment hollow, because that is really nothing new.
If they beat human performance in this (non-AI-building) field by humans painstakingly coding rules for specific situations, then that's cool I guess but not groundbreaking, because the solution doesn't generalise.
If they beat human performance in a field heretofore intractable by software by throwing the basic rules and a ton of compute at an algorithm and then waiting for six weeks while the algorithm figures the rest out by itself, then that absolutely is qualitatively different.
The reason being, of course, that if they can find an algorithm that works like this across a wide enough problem space then eventually they'll find an algorithm which will work on the question of "build a better algorithm." After which, as we know, all bets are off.
If you think the how is irrelevant you are completely missing the point of this exercise. Maybe to you only the result matters but for every other task and humanity the how matters.
Simply imagine next taking on a different Game like one version of the Anno series.
If developers did it by hand, you need 50 devs sitting there for probably a couple of months, figuring out the best, rules their sequence and putting them in. That is about $20 Million just to get a similar AI for the next game.
Compare that to download all available replays, requiring maybe 2-3 data scientist to get the data into shape, renting some compute in the google cloud and you get the same or a better result for probably half a million $.
Watch and learn from data alone is why modern machine learning is considered a revolution and novelty. Buying compute time in the cloud is in comparison (to devs and hand coding) dirt cheap and the results are often better.
Deepmind is not working on this problem for the benefit of gamers or the Starcraft community. Making the perfect bot is not the aim. Tackling the next hurdle, next hardest problem in machine learning is. On the way to become better at generalizing the learning algorithms.
Speed of play is a fundamentally important gameplay mechanic of any real-time game. One of the main reasons the pros are better than amateurs at these types of game is because they play and react faster.
And yes, of course computers are much better at doing things more quickly than humans. It's not even remotely close for us. The AIs are clearly better. It's not cheating either; they are legitimately better at it than us.
It sounds like you're simply objecting to pitting people up against computers in real-time games entirely.
So all they really proved is computers are faster then humans. I knew that before this started.
The Deepmind team knows the challenge isn’t to beat humans at Starcraft. That is trivially easy with the advantages you mentioned. The challenge is to be better at strategy then a human. That is why they tried to add artificial rules to make the AI have similar physical limitations to a human (emulated mouse, rate limited actions, emulated screen and visibility). There have been micro AI bots for years that could out preform any human. They knew they weren’t just trying to build another micro bot, because if they were it wouldn’t be much of an accomplishment.
> The Deepmind team knows the challenge isn’t to beat humans at Starcraft. That is trivially easy with the advantages you mentioned.
It's not trivially easy at all. No one had come close before. It took an entire team of ML experts at Google to pull it off. These hard-coded micro bots you're referring to didn't holistically play the entire game and win at it. They're more akin to an aimbot in FPSes, not a self-learning general game-playing AI.
This is yet another in a long string of impressive AI achievements being minimized through moving the goalposts. It's facile and it's boring.
>It's not cheating either; they are legitimately better at it than us.
This is not 100% true, the AI still skips the mechanical part (it doesn't have a mouse, keyboard and hands) in this particular case. This alone can introduce insane amounts of additional complexity, and will make AI to not be pixel precise.
yup. you could have 200 apm, but as long as your clicks and button presses are perfect, you are going to win against someone with 800 but is super imprecise.
blink stalkers are basically perfect for an AI because of the precision they can blink them around.
I assume you’re joking, but just in case you aren’t, Scrabble bots have outperformed top humans for 20 years with little more than a basic Monte Carlo tree search.
Chess and Go don't have any form of micro and AIs are nevertheless dominant there.
I'd say, give AI development another year and I wouldn't expect there to be any kind of game, in any genre, that humans can beat AIs at. Whether it's Chess, Go, other classical board games, Civilization, MOBAs, RTSes, FPSs, etc.