I agree. I think you'd have to limit that machine's APM to somewhere around the human limit, and make it choose which actions it wants to spend its time on.
Otherwise the AI is eventually just going to absolutely destroy humans with micro, which is not remotely interesting. We've known transistors were faster than fingers for ages.
'Computers are capable of extremely fast control, but that doesn’t necessarily demonstrate intelligence, so agents must interact with the game within limits of human dexterity in terms of “Actions Per Minute”.'
Yes, this is definitely necessary for it to be interesting. Even so the AI will have some significant advantages over a human, in terms of being able to perfectly time events like injects, chrono boosts, etc., and watching every visible area of the minimap at once, so never being unnecessarily surprised by an attack. There are plenty of other examples. Nothing that's technically impossible for a human, but the ai will be perfect at those aspects as a given. For the human player to win, even limiting the machine's APM, they will need considerably superior strategy to make up for these differences.
Also, I'm not sure how they plan to limit APM, but if it's done in the naive way - the AI simply isn't allowed to surpass an APM of X, there will be plenty of optimizing it can do in terms of spending those actions more optimally than a human could (in some cases by performing fewer but more difficult actions to accomplish a task), as well as by remaining at peak APM continuously throughout an entire match. (Something that is a hallmark of great players, but like map awareness and macro timing, no human is able to keep up their peak speed indefinitely without any lapses.)
Why not limit it to a certain number of keys typed per second, and a certain rate of moving the cursor? Maybe randomly wait 0-150 ms before sending a keypress to simulate human imprecision?
What "somerandomness" what pointing out is that nobody in this thread seems to have actually clicked on the link. DeepMind's article clearly states that they would limit the number of actions per minute (traditionally referred to as APM in esports) taken by their AI, yet people are still saying that this wouldn't be impressive because the machine has an unlimited number of actions.
Clicking the same button twice in a row in rapid succession is much easier for a human to do than clicking two small buttons on different parts of the screen. A naive counter of "actions per minute" would count both things as exactly the same number of actions.
Whenever the harder action is better than the simpler one, the AI would gain an intrinsic advantage even though it's limited to the same number of APM.
My post (the grandparent to yours) fully acknowledges that. However, there are many different things that count as an action in starcraft, and even with a cap on APM, there will be many ways for a computer to pack in more useful actions than a human. Also a computer will have other innate advantages, like perfect timing and map awareness. An equally skilled human will therefore need stronger strategy to make up for these disadvantages. Your parent post appears to suggest mitigating these other advantages in various ways (although I don't personally agree with that approach, since the computer isn't doing something that's out of reach for humans, just things that aren't practical for humans to achieve consistently).
If you did NOT limit APM, it wouldn't even be a contest. The AI could simply mass first tier units and crush any human opponent with micro.
I do not understand the point of an AI if you want it to be equal in all ways to a human. Why not just fight a human?
The goal is to build an AI that is at least as good as pro players (which would involve building models and technology capable of taking complex decisions etc.). The goal was never to implement something that is strictly equal to a human.
You cannot blame the AI for having a better memory and perfect timing, or next thing you know you'll ask them to limit the RAM to something comparable to the memory in a human brain and use older processors to restrict the unfair advantage current computation clusters have.
Regarding your last point: even without limiting APM, there is no AI that can currently compete with decent players . If it was as easy as you say, people would've done that with Broodwar which has open APIs. The fact is that micro alone cannot win a StarCraft game. Perfectly micro-ed zerglings cannot do much against a terran turtling behind a closed wall and shooting with marines, or a protoss with immortals and adepts.
> I do not understand the point of an AI if you want it to be equal in all ways to a human. Why not just fight a human?
Well, if you want just an AI to win with humans, you can stick to playing chess - nowadays the AI can drunk-walk its way to victory through the game tree faster than humans can make leaps in strategic thinking. The point of such experiment here is to impose limits on what an AI can do in order to cancel out "trivial" advantages it has, so that the challenge for AI developers will be to improve the core of strategic thinking & planning. Victory by perfect micro is not interesting[0]. Neither is victory by perfect macro. You need to curtail the avenues which would let the AI win by executing utterly dumb strategies with machine-like precision if you want the AI to develop smart strategies.
TL;DR: because humans are not programmable, so they cannot be rapidly improved ;).
The examples you previously gave are different from what you're saying now, but like I said the article clearly said that they will limit the number of actions per minute which means: no gimmicky/weird micro tricks.
Any other advantage you mentioned (computers having a larger memory and faster reaction time than humans) shouldn't be removed, as that doesn't make any sense: machines will be machines. You're building an AI on such a complex game because you want to be able to model hard problems with incomplete information, and to do so you do need to use a lot of memory and the computer's fast processing... even if that means being faster than a human. That is "fair".
> Your parent post appears to suggest mitigating these other advantages in various ways (although I don't personally agree with that approach, since the computer isn't doing something that's out of reach for humans, just things that aren't practical for humans to achieve consistently).
As far as your last paragraph, I suspect the issue is that people building AIs generally try to follow the spirit of the game. I believe it would be possible write an AI that wins by perfectly macroing out tier-1 units, rushing, and perfectly microing them (and obviously it would be much easier than to build a more general Starcraft AI). If it hasn't been done, I expect that's because it would be little more than a gimmick. It certainly wouldn't be any fun to play against, nor would it advance AI in general.
I don't think it's as easy as that. Even with perfect macro + micro, your opponent could simply scout you, see what build you're going for, and counter your build.
Pro players do have (quasi-)perfect macro: They build units and buildings exactly when they should be built (especially at the early stages of the game). They also have an excellent micro. What makes one player win against the other is often the choices they make (going for a surprising build, or simply executing an attack in a way their opponent wouldn't be ready for).
So I'm pretty sure an AI that would just mass zerglings and micro them "perfectly" still would be crushed by decent players that know how to counter that rush. (build a wall, and have siege tanks or a similar unit)
This is one thing that I think would be fascinating when (if) we get to a competitive AI in this arena.
Do we eventually see the hypothetical human (or AI!) opponent trying to metagame against the way an AI system interacts with the game? E.g. human-pointless feints in an attempt to pollute AI logic?
Under the premise that a competitive AI will reason and act differently than a competitive human (due to aforementioned difference in speed/memory vs abstract thinking resources).
The problem with that is, most counters to first tier units rely on splash damage. As zerg for instance, if your opponent is rushing with lings or marines, you need banelings. But it would be trivial for an ai to neutralize the splash damage, so that wouldn't work.
Generally speaking, the counters are balanced for human players. Biased toward high level players, but still human.
We've seen exactly this happen in competitive play. There was a player who would always play "Mech" Terran units, even though it wasn't the best strategy, because he had a lower APM than the Korean pros did.
How does the AI "know" which Zergling is going to be fired upon? Are the tank shots not instant-hit? Or is this just a demonstration of what actual optimal control would look like.
The tanks aren't given overriding manual commands, so it likely could just predict how their automatic targeting works. If a player would give commands, it could get at least some information from the animation frames before the target is aquired and the shot fired.
(The implementation in the video likely just cheats and gets the information from the engine, but at least the first case should be deterministic enough)
There's almost certainly a bunch of timing-based micro with animations/game ticks/etc that a machine would find. For example, if a machine does a sequence of actions with sub-millisecond precision they can pop a unit into range, fire, and then pop back out again without being fired upon over and over.
A lot of units would be rendered useless because it's balanced for humans. That means the units they counter would be a lot stronger. I'm afraid it would probably just be a race to get the fastest rush.
What you're describing is called "kiting", and is already being done by regular players (not to mention the pros). It is only possible for some combinations of units, for example Marines with stimpack vs regular zerglings ("slowlings"), or Viking vs Void Ray because one unit needs to be fast enough to be able to shoot + move out of range before being shot.
They do say that they will limit the number of actions taken by the AI to focus on building a smart and strategic AI instead of learning gimmicky micro moves, but if one thing is sure, it's that even the best micro cannot win a StarCraft game if the macro is not on point, and bad choices are made (good luck micro-ing siege tanks against a swarm host!)
Rushing is a bit of a rock paper scissors situation. You can beat a fast rush by doing a slightly slower rush that focuses more on economy, and winning via defenders advantage.
I haven't played SC in a few years, but I think I can give a basic answer.
There's would not be one optimal strategy, but many optimal strategies depending on the matchup between units. By taking advantages in differences in movement speed, attack range, attack projectile speed, and attack cooldown, a weaker group of units can potentially beat a stronger group.
This is an older video that demonstrates some examples of winning with good micro: https://youtu.be/CdSKD3LRHV8?t=11. An AI knowledgeable of and capable of executing such tactics would be pretty strong.
Just on the surface, these sorts of games are notoriously difficult to balance properly. Someone discovers a strategy that tips the balance, and units/abilities/whatever have to get nerfed. The odds that there's a stable balance at a level of play not actively tested (e.g., infinite APM) are extremely low.
One example is a sibling post's video of 100 zerglings against 20 siege tanks. For humans, the zerglings are capable of destroying only a handful of tanks before being killed of. For an AI with infinite APM, they can move all but an individual targeted zergling out of the way of the tank's splash damage. This allows them to take out all of the siege tanks with only moderate losses. Many such matchups will be tossed on their heads, and it's likely that one of them is totally game-breaking.
There is a lua widget in spring rts that allows for units with at least one farsighted unit to automatically stay out of los. Sneaky army will wriggle through all defense lines.
Void rays are countered by AOE anti air. With infinite APM there is no need for two rays to be hit by the same aoe. Further AOE tends to do less direct dammage, so VR with infante APM may hard counter a lot more unit types than intended. IMO, the risk is more from something like blink stalkers becoming insanely resource efficient.
Simple example would be in combat, like being always out of range ect ...
Imagine one army where every single unit is controlled by one human. Each individual unit would be very very strong.
Infinite micro? I'd just send all drones/probes/SCVs directly to the human's base and kill their drones. The extra drones that the human has wouldn't be able to make up the difference.
This is already an infamous strategy (worker rush) and it os easily countered as long as you have all your workers united and attack at once (not much micro can be done at that point, and the numerical advantage trumps that... unless you're playing protoss and constantly trying to replenish shields, and still!).
Also, I'm pretty sure this is not something that DeepMind would do to "solve intelligence".
still a tough question but they could do some insane things. for instance if they had 200 marines and controlled each individually i can't imagine what they'd do. for humans it's requires insane mechanics to even break them up into 8 seperatel groups and control them for more than a few seconds
Otherwise the AI is eventually just going to absolutely destroy humans with micro, which is not remotely interesting. We've known transistors were faster than fingers for ages.