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.
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.