It was using micro effectively, but the crazy 1200+ APM fight was pretty unusual. If you look at most of its fights (e.g. https://youtu.be/H3MCb4W7-kM?t=2854 , APM number appears intermittently in the center-bottom ), with 6-10 units, it’s using about the same APM as the human—the micro advantage for 98% of the game isn’t because it’s clicking faster, its clicks are just better.
There were a bunch of mistakes in the first matches shown, but when they trained for twice as long it seemed like those mistakes mostly went away, and its macro play seemed within the range of skilled humans (if you’re willing to suspect that overbuilding probes might be good).
I don’t know anything about StarCraft, but the impression I got was that a few seconds of superhuman clicking in high leverage situations can mean a lot.
Agreed that this is a big improvement on previous StarCraft AIs no matter its clicking speed, but this seems like reason to doubt that AI has surpassed human strategy in StarCraft.
but this seems like reason to doubt that AI has surpassed human strategy in StarCraft
I think Charlie might be suggesting that AlphaStar would be superior to humans, even with only human or sub-human APM, because the precision of those actions would still be superhuman, even if the total number was slightly subhuman:
the micro advantage for 98% of the game isn’t because it’s clicking faster, its clicks are just better
This wouldn’t necessarily mean that AlphaStar is better at strategy.
It was using micro effectively, but the crazy 1200+ APM fight was pretty unusual. If you look at most of its fights (e.g. https://youtu.be/H3MCb4W7-kM?t=2854 , APM number appears intermittently in the center-bottom ), with 6-10 units, it’s using about the same APM as the human—the micro advantage for 98% of the game isn’t because it’s clicking faster, its clicks are just better.
There were a bunch of mistakes in the first matches shown, but when they trained for twice as long it seemed like those mistakes mostly went away, and its macro play seemed within the range of skilled humans (if you’re willing to suspect that overbuilding probes might be good).
I don’t know anything about StarCraft, but the impression I got was that a few seconds of superhuman clicking in high leverage situations can mean a lot.
Agreed that this is a big improvement on previous StarCraft AIs no matter its clicking speed, but this seems like reason to doubt that AI has surpassed human strategy in StarCraft.
I think Charlie might be suggesting that AlphaStar would be superior to humans, even with only human or sub-human APM, because the precision of those actions would still be superhuman, even if the total number was slightly subhuman:
This wouldn’t necessarily mean that AlphaStar is better at strategy.