Eric Herboso

Karma: 44

Eric Herboso 2 Apr 2023 6:44 UTC
9 points
2
in reply to: Furcas’s comment on: Hooray for stepping out of the limelight
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.

Eric Herboso 15 Jan 2022 22:14 UTC
3 points
in reply to: maia’s comment on: School Daze
In the state of Maryland, an exemption to truancy laws exist while a state of emergency is declared. So, in MD, you can just not go to school up until Jan 31 (when the current state of emergency in MD expires) and you’d face no penalty with regard to truancy laws.
While I’m sure many other states have similar laws in place, there may or may not be states of emergency declared there that would cause this exemption to be valid.
Also, there is the issue that this exemption is solely for the purpose of truancy laws. If a child in MD stayed home, they (and their guardian) could not be prosecuted/fined for truancy, but there would still be other consequences for having “unexcused” absences.

Eric Herboso 1 Nov 2020 15:58 UTC
7 points
in reply to: maximkazhenkov’s comment on: AlphaStar: Impressive for RL progress, not for AGI progress
It’s been two years since AlphaStar used anti-harassment worker oversaturation to great effect, and, as far as I’m aware, not a single progamer has tried it in a GSL match since then. This morning the last GSL match of 2020 marks the 1003rd GSL game since AlphaStar’s demonstration, and (to my knowledge) the only games where workers were overmade were when there was a significantly different reason for doing so (being contained, maynarding workers, executing a timing attack). The consensus among SC2 pros appears to be that AlphaStar was wrong to overmake workers as an anti-harassment measure, despite significant community discussion in early 2019 about its potential.

Eric Herboso 3 Nov 2019 4:38 UTC
20 points
in reply to: Eric Herboso’s comment on: AlphaStar: Impressive for RL progress, not for AGI progress
After watching Oriol & Dario on the Pylon Show, I now feel that my previous statement was a bit too strong. It’s true that Alphastar doesn’t scout as much, but it certainly does seem to scout in the early game. They showed an excellent example of Alphastar specifically checking for a lair, examples where it attempted to hide a dark shrine (unsuccessfully), and they spoke about ways in which it would explicitly scout for various building types. They did follow this up by saying that Alphastar is definitively not as good at scouting as it is at other things, and that its deficiencies at scouting caused it to underperform at other strategies. But my earlier claim of it not scouting buildings at all is certainly incorrect. It scouts, but not well, at least not in comparison to the other things it does at the pro level.

Eric Herboso 2 Nov 2019 18:35 UTC
10 points
on: AlphaStar: Impressive for RL progress, not for AGI progress
it doesn’t do very well at building up a reactive decision tree of strategies (if I scout this, I do that)
In StarCraft terminology, this seems to be completely accurate. But for non-starcraft players, they may get the wrong impression that AlphaStar doesn’t scout at all.
AlphaStar does scout, in the sense of seeing whether an attack is coming, and then moving into position to defend against it. It does check to see which units are coming, and then sends the appropriate defense against them. But this is not what the term “scout” is usually used for in StarCraft.
In StarCraft, “scouting” almost always refers to scouting the opponent’s buildings, not units. A good player scouts to see whether this or that building exists, and then reacts by doing something that would counter that strategy. So far as I can see, AlphaStar does not do this. (In an hour, Oriol Vinyals and Dario Wünsch will be guests on the Pylon Show, where we may get more details on where AlphaStar is underperforming.) But I do think it is important to clarify that AlphaStar does seem to scout units in the replays I’ve seen.