You may be right about Deepmind’s intentions in general but, I’m certain that the reason they didn’t brag about AlphaStar is because it didn’t quite succeed. There never was an official series between the best SC2 player in the world and AlphaStar. And, once Grandmaster-level players got a bit used to playing against AlphaStar, even they could beat it, to say nothing of pros. AlphaStar had excellent micro-management and decent tactics, but zero strategic ability. It had the appearance of strategic thinking because there were in fact multiple AlphaStars, each one having learned a different build during training. But then each instance would always execute that build. We never saw AlphaStar do something as elementary as scouting the enemy’s army composition and building the units that would best counter it.
So Deepmind saw they had only partially succeeded, but for some reason instead of continuing their work on AlphaStar they decided to declare victory and quietly move on to another project.
While I largely agree with this comment, I do want to point out that I think AlphaStar did in fact do some amount of scouting. When Oriol and Dario spoke about AlphaStar on The Pylon Show in December 2019, they showed an example of AlphaStar specifically checking for a lair and verbally spoke about other examples where it would check for a handful of other building types.
They also spoke about how it is particularly deficient at scouting, only looking for a few specific buildings, and that this causes it to significantly underperform in situations where scouting would be used by humans to get more ahead.
You said that “[w]e never saw AlphaStar do something as elementary as scouting the enemy’s army composition and building the units that would best counter it.” I’m not sure this is strictly true. At least according to Oriol, AlphaStar did scout for a handful of building types (though maybe not necessarily unit types) and appeared to change what it did according to the buildings it scouted.
With that said, this nitpick doesn’t change the main point of your comment, which I concur with. AlphaStar did not succeed in nearly the same way that they hoped it would, and the combination of how long it took to train and the changing nature of how StarCraft gets patched meant that it would have been prohibitively expensive to try to get it trained to a level similar to what AlhpaGo had achieved.
Disagree-voted just because of the words “I’m certain that the reason...”. I’d be much less skeptical of “I’m pretty dang sure that the reason...” or at the very least “I’m certain that an important contributing factor was...”
(But even the latter seems pretty hard unless you have a lot of insider knowledge from talking to the people who made the decision at DeepMind, along with a lot of trust in them. E.g., if it did turn out that DeepMind was trying to reduce AI hype, then they might have advertised a result less if they thought it were a bigger deal. I don’t know this to be so, but it’s an example of why I raise an eyebrow at “I’m certain that the reason”.)
You may be right about Deepmind’s intentions in general but, I’m certain that the reason they didn’t brag about AlphaStar is because it didn’t quite succeed. There never was an official series between the best SC2 player in the world and AlphaStar. And, once Grandmaster-level players got a bit used to playing against AlphaStar, even they could beat it, to say nothing of pros. AlphaStar had excellent micro-management and decent tactics, but zero strategic ability. It had the appearance of strategic thinking because there were in fact multiple AlphaStars, each one having learned a different build during training. But then each instance would always execute that build. We never saw AlphaStar do something as elementary as scouting the enemy’s army composition and building the units that would best counter it.
So Deepmind saw they had only partially succeeded, but for some reason instead of continuing their work on AlphaStar they decided to declare victory and quietly move on to another project.
While I largely agree with this comment, I do want to point out that I think AlphaStar did in fact do some amount of scouting. When Oriol and Dario spoke about AlphaStar on The Pylon Show in December 2019, they showed an example of AlphaStar specifically checking for a lair and verbally spoke about other examples where it would check for a handful of other building types.
They also spoke about how it is particularly deficient at scouting, only looking for a few specific buildings, and that this causes it to significantly underperform in situations where scouting would be used by humans to get more ahead.
You said that “[w]e never saw AlphaStar do something as elementary as scouting the enemy’s army composition and building the units that would best counter it.” I’m not sure this is strictly true. At least according to Oriol, AlphaStar did scout for a handful of building types (though maybe not necessarily unit types) and appeared to change what it did according to the buildings it scouted.
With that said, this nitpick doesn’t change the main point of your comment, which I concur with. AlphaStar did not succeed in nearly the same way that they hoped it would, and the combination of how long it took to train and the changing nature of how StarCraft gets patched meant that it would have been prohibitively expensive to try to get it trained to a level similar to what AlhpaGo had achieved.
Disagree-voted just because of the words “I’m certain that the reason...”. I’d be much less skeptical of “I’m pretty dang sure that the reason...” or at the very least “I’m certain that an important contributing factor was...”
(But even the latter seems pretty hard unless you have a lot of insider knowledge from talking to the people who made the decision at DeepMind, along with a lot of trust in them. E.g., if it did turn out that DeepMind was trying to reduce AI hype, then they might have advertised a result less if they thought it were a bigger deal. I don’t know this to be so, but it’s an example of why I raise an eyebrow at “I’m certain that the reason”.)
Yeah I never got the impression that they got a robust solution to fog of war, or any sort of theory of mind, which you absolutely need for Starcraft.