
An AI crushed two human pros at StarCraft–but it wasn’t a fair fight - okket
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/an-ai-crushed-two-human-pros-at-starcraft-but-it-wasnt-a-fair-fight/
======
dragontamer
An army of Stalkers should __NEVER __beat an army of Immortals.

Stalkers have 14.4 DPS (vs Armored units) while Immortals have 48.1 DPS (vs
Armored units). Both Immortals and Stalkers are armored.

Immortals provide more than double DPS, with 200+100 HP / Shields. While
Stalkers have only 80+80 HP / shields. Stalkers cost roughly 1/2 of an
Immortal, but any "even match" would have roughly 2x Stalkers for every
Immortal.

Immortals do roughly 3.5x more damage while having 2x the HP (Immortals have a
bonus ability to gain +100 Shields as well). Even if outnumbered 2-to-1,
Immortals shouldn't lose the fight.

The problem is that AlphaStar can watch all of its Stalkers's HP
simultaneously, and blink them away from danger instantly. AlphaStar is
playing a game that is fundamentally different than what Humans play. In
AlphaStar's version of Starcraft, Stalkers win vs Immortals. All you gotta do
is Blink away low-HP Stalkers to the back line, and then have the Stalkers
regenerate their shields before bringing them back into battle.

Its inhuman. Maybe its intelligence, but its an exceptionally poor
demonstration of intelligence.

\---------------

The game that the AI played was not Starcraft, certainly not the game that
humans play. Humans cannot physically click quickly enough to move stalkers in
the way that AlphaStar did. The screen humans look at cannot show all of the
HP of your individual units. The screen humans look at can only see __some
__of the battlefield, not the entire battlefield.

That's the main issue with the demonstration. Sure, the APM rules were
designed to prevent this situation from happening, but the demonstration
proved that the APM-caps were insufficient at creating human-like playing
conditions.

~~~
Rallerbabs
The goal was to have an AI defeat humans at SC2. Mission accomplished.

Was it fair when AlphaStar tried getting at an air unit with all its land
units and pissed away a lot of time doing so, while Mana proceeded to
obliterate its base?

What if a future AI solves cancer from scratch in a day? Are we going to find
reasons to call this 'AI vs Mother Nature' match unfair?

Silly hoomans don't need to look for reasons why AlphaStar was playing unfair.
It's just a game. And machines will be better at it. They'll be better at
everything. Make your peace with that.

DeepMind has only just gotten started. Like with Go. AlphaGo was trained for
years. AlphaZero was trained for days. The latter obliterated the former.

DeepMind is reading this criticism, don't you know. What do you think
AlphaStarZero will be doing in a few years time?

Crushing AlphaStar 100 out of 100 times, with low APM. That's what.

~~~
dragontamer
> The goal was to have an AI defeat humans at SC2.

Hardly. They put APM caps in there for a reason. We all know that a real
research team going all out with 100,000+ APM would have zerglings dodging
tanks and other super-human shennanigans going on. But that's simply not
interesting.

Nominally, AlphaStar set a 300 APM cap on the match. Apparently its a 300 APM
average across the match however, which means the cap wasn't really effective
at preventing "superhuman" conditions. Hopefully the next demo will better
address that shortcoming and lead to more interesting matches.

I think the main lesson of the demo is that "APM" is a poor metric for what
they're going for. A new metric needs to be developed. Other posters
downthread were talking about "eAPM" (Effective APM). A formalized version of
the concept may help.

~~~
Rallerbabs
>>The goal was to have an AI defeat humans at SC2.

>Hardly.

After cracking Go, DeepMind stated that it was going after SC2.

This is recorded history, so don't even think about deluding yourself into
thinking otherwise.

------
pacala
When a swarm of killer drones comes down your neighborhood, good luck
complaining "it wasn't a fair fight".

~~~
dragontamer
We have fully automated homing cruise missiles since the 1980s. That's what
modern combat is about these days. That's why guerilla fighters exist: to hide
from US Troops because they can't win in a fair fight. They need to use
civilians as shields (and there's no AI that can determine friend from foe
yet).

\---------

The Starcraft demo was supposed to be a demonstration of intelligence. Not a
demonstration of superior-accuracy and superior-dexterity that machines have.
We've known for years that machines can see things at the millisecond level
and react faster than us for some time.

The AI problems trying to be solved today are "friend vs foe" recognition,
strategic decision making, etc. etc. The AlphaGo game managed to demonstrate
that. But the AlphaStar games only demonstrated what we already know about
computers: Computers can click faster, and more accurately, than humans can.

~~~
pacala
1 Tomahawk missile = $1,000,000

1 10kg payload drone = $10,000

Bonus: the killer drone can hang around for hours and tell fried from foe via
biometric recognition [voice, face, gait], dutifully compiled by your nearby
adtech multinational. Finally we can afford genocide on a private budget.

------
alexc05
you want skynet? 'cause that's how you get skynet.

~~~
stcredzero
"But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps,
to smash those metal motherf___rs into junk. He turned it around. He brought
us back from the brink. His name is Connor. John Connor. Your son, Sarah...
your unborn son."

From the article:

 _" This is what I'm used to seeing when humans battle AIs," Stemkoski said,
as Komincz dropped the Immortals in AlphaStar's base for the third time.
"You're finding something that they're doing that's a mistake and you're
making them do it over, and over, and over."_

It seems that right now, AI is good at figuring out useful tactics and
applying them. It's not so good at seeing when its useful tactics are turned
against them. In that way, it's similar to humans.

