
AlphaStar: An Evolutionary Computation Perspective - pplonski86
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01724
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zimablue
I am sceptical of Alphastar. It's not at all like alphazero, it's lots of
complex parts glued together.

In the third group (second of the human and first post-review) of games,
against a slightly modified version, the human won. I don't think it was a
version modification, I think it was because the human had chance to review
the computer's play and think of gaps. Maybe it's stronger than I think or can
get stronger, but it looked like the first time a human got to sit down and
think about it they could find significant holes in it's understanding. The
games it won it mostly just crushed with superhuman micro, that's different in
a one-off series than being consistently pro strength.

That's fair enough because it's a complex game but it just didn't seem as
"polished/finished" as the chess/go demonstrations.

~~~
Dzugaru
I was sceptical at first but after watching MaNa story video [0] - not
anymore. Starcraft2 is a very complex game, but I’ve been able to crush best
blizzard AI after a week playing - yes its that weak. Seeing AlphaStar
strategy, from simple correct building placement to micro decision making is
so much more inspiring. And it was achieved by deep reinforcement learning -
never seen a more unstable and unpredictable algorithms in my machine learning
career - even in fully observable environments. What DeepMind did - achieving
THAT level of play, even if AlphaStar can see the whole map and micro 3 groups
of units at once - is incredible.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgIFoepzhIo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgIFoepzhIo)

~~~
scj
You may want to try playing against some of the AIs developed by the Student
Starcraft AI Tournament such as SAIDA, Locutus, CherryPi, krasi0, Iron Bot,
and tscmoo.

If I could make a single recommendation to future AlphaStar opponents, it
would be to prep against these AIs. AlphaStar has style overlap with the AIs
mentioned above, and I'd like to see a match with human better prepared for
that.

The SSCAIT has a weekly broadcast which demonstrates the strengths and
weaknesses of AI players quite well.

