I think there are two perspectives to view the mechanical constraints put on AlphaStar:
One is the “fairness” perspective, which is that the constraints should perfectly mirror that of a human player, be it effective APM, reaction time, camera control, clicking accuracy etc. This is the perspective held mostly by the gaming community, but it is difficult to implement in practice as shown by this post, requiring enormous analysis and calibration effort.
The other is what I call the “aesthetics” perspective, which is that the constraints should be used to force the AI into a rich strategy space where its moves are gratifying to watch and interesting to analyze. The constraints can be very asymmetrical with respect to human constraints.
In retrospect, I think the second one is what they should have gone with, because there is a single constraint could have achieved it: signal delay
Think about it: what good would arbitrarily high APM and clicking accuracy amount to if the ping is 400-500ms?
It would naturally introduce uncertainties through imperfect predictions and bias towards longer-term thinking anywhere on the timescale from seconds to minutes
It would naturally move the agent into the complex strategy space that was purposefully designed into the game but got circumvented by exploiting certain edge cases like ungodly blink stalker micro
It avoids painstaking analysis of the multi-dimensional constraint-space by reducing it down to a single variable
The interesting parts of the strategy space were not designed in even for human players. There is a lot of promoting bugs to features and player creative effort that has shaped the balance. There is a certain game the game designers and player play. Players try to abuse every edge and designers try to keep the game interesting and balanced. Forbidding AI to find it’s own edge cases would impose a differnt incentive structure than humans deal with.
This is not true. In Starcraft Broodwar there are lot’s of bugs that players take advantage of but such bugs don’t exist in Starcraft 2.
I think it’s much more important to restrict the AI mechanically so that it has to succeed strategically that to have a fair fight. The whole conversation about fairness is misguided anyway. The point of APM limiter is to remove confounding factors and increase validity of our measurement, not to increase fairness.
Here to say the same thing.
Say I want to discover better strategies in SC2 using AlphaStar, it’s extremely important that Alphastar be employing some arbitrarily low human achievable level of athleticism.
I was disappointed when the vs TLO videos came out that TLO thought he was playing against one agent AlphaStar. But in fact he played against five different agents which employed five different strategies, not a single agent which was adjusting and choosing among a broad range of strategies.
In making of starcraft 2 there was the issue of what mechanics to carry over from sc1. If a mechanic that is kept is a ascended bug you off course provide a clean implementation so the new games mechanic is not a bug. But it still means that the mechanic was not put in the palette by a human even if a human decides to keep it for the next game. The complex strategy spaces are discovered and proven rather than built or designed. If the game doesn’t play like it was designed but is not broken then it tends to not get fixed. In reverse if a designers balance doesn’t result in a good meta in the wild the onus is on the designers to introduce a patch that actually results in a healthy meta and not make players play in a specific way to keep the game working.
I think there are two perspectives to view the mechanical constraints put on AlphaStar:
One is the “fairness” perspective, which is that the constraints should perfectly mirror that of a human player, be it effective APM, reaction time, camera control, clicking accuracy etc. This is the perspective held mostly by the gaming community, but it is difficult to implement in practice as shown by this post, requiring enormous analysis and calibration effort.
The other is what I call the “aesthetics” perspective, which is that the constraints should be used to force the AI into a rich strategy space where its moves are gratifying to watch and interesting to analyze. The constraints can be very asymmetrical with respect to human constraints.
In retrospect, I think the second one is what they should have gone with, because there is a single constraint could have achieved it: signal delay
Think about it: what good would arbitrarily high APM and clicking accuracy amount to if the ping is 400-500ms?
It would naturally introduce uncertainties through imperfect predictions and bias towards longer-term thinking anywhere on the timescale from seconds to minutes
It would naturally move the agent into the complex strategy space that was purposefully designed into the game but got circumvented by exploiting certain edge cases like ungodly blink stalker micro
It avoids painstaking analysis of the multi-dimensional constraint-space by reducing it down to a single variable
The interesting parts of the strategy space were not designed in even for human players. There is a lot of promoting bugs to features and player creative effort that has shaped the balance. There is a certain game the game designers and player play. Players try to abuse every edge and designers try to keep the game interesting and balanced. Forbidding AI to find it’s own edge cases would impose a differnt incentive structure than humans deal with.
This is not true. In Starcraft Broodwar there are lot’s of bugs that players take advantage of but such bugs don’t exist in Starcraft 2.
I think it’s much more important to restrict the AI mechanically so that it has to succeed strategically that to have a fair fight. The whole conversation about fairness is misguided anyway. The point of APM limiter is to remove confounding factors and increase validity of our measurement, not to increase fairness.
Here to say the same thing. Say I want to discover better strategies in SC2 using AlphaStar, it’s extremely important that Alphastar be employing some arbitrarily low human achievable level of athleticism.
I was disappointed when the vs TLO videos came out that TLO thought he was playing against one agent AlphaStar. But in fact he played against five different agents which employed five different strategies, not a single agent which was adjusting and choosing among a broad range of strategies.
In making of starcraft 2 there was the issue of what mechanics to carry over from sc1. If a mechanic that is kept is a ascended bug you off course provide a clean implementation so the new games mechanic is not a bug. But it still means that the mechanic was not put in the palette by a human even if a human decides to keep it for the next game. The complex strategy spaces are discovered and proven rather than built or designed. If the game doesn’t play like it was designed but is not broken then it tends to not get fixed. In reverse if a designers balance doesn’t result in a good meta in the wild the onus is on the designers to introduce a patch that actually results in a healthy meta and not make players play in a specific way to keep the game working.