[Link] Did AlphaStar just click faster?

Well, it definitely may have had an advantage that embodied humans can't have. "Does perfect stalker micro really count as intelligence?", we wail. But you have to remember that previous starcraft bots playing with completely unrestricted apm weren't even close to competitive level. I think that the evidence is pretty strong that AlphaStar (at least the version without attention that just perceived the whole map) could beat humans under whatever symmetric APM cap you want.

I think the most interesting part of the piece is the bit at the end where the author analyzes a misleading graph. Now that I understand the graph, it seems like like strong evidence towards malicious misrepresentation or willful ignorance on the part of some subset (possibly quite small) of the AlphaStar team.

I think the article might benefit from comparisons to OpenAI's Dota demonstration. I don't remember anyone complaining about superhuman micro in that case. Did that team do something to combat superhuman-APM, or is Starcraft just more vulnerable than Dota to superhuman-APM tactics?

Also discussed in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f3iXyQurcpwJfZTE9/alphastar-mastering-the-real-time-strategy-game-starcraft-ii

I think the right way to frame this is that AlphaStar has done the Starcraft 2 equivalent of mastering blitz chess. Blitz chess is easier for computers than slow chess because humans don't cope well with time pressure. Starcraft 2 imposes fairly extreme time pressure by default; humans need to make multiple actions per second, which means they're choosing between multi-action templates rather than optimizing each action separately. An interesting challenge for AI would be the Starcraft equivalent of slow chess: Starcraft played at 1/10th speed.

There's a "simple" fix for this. Make the computer play with the same user interface the human does: a screen, keyboard, and mouse. I don't know if robots can control a computer mouse with superhuman precision or not, but it certainly would keep it from making moves all over the map at the same time...

My take away is that we should actually only be counting EPM in these matches, rather than APM, and counting most/all of AlphaStar's clicks as effective.

Above and beyond it's APM, it was doing things humans physically can't do with the camera in order to micro perfectly on three effective screens at once, with effectively infinite mouse speed, and no input lag

Basically, #2 in the article dominates with how it won

Interesting article. It argues that the AI learned spam clicking from human replays, then needed its APM cap raised to prevent spam clicking from eating up all of its APM budget and inhibiting learning. Therefore, it was permitted to use inhumanly high burst APM, and with all its clicks potentially effective actions instead of spam, its effective actions per minute (EPM, actions not counting spam clicks) are going to outclass human pros to the point of breaking the game and rendering actual strategy redundant.

Except that if it's spamming, those clicks aren't effective actions, and if those clicks are effective actions, it's not spamming. To the extent Alphastar spams, its superhuman APM is misleading, and the match is fairer than it might otherwise appear. To the extent that it's using high burst EPM instead, that can potentially turn the game into a micro match rather than the strategy match that people are more interested in. But that isn't a question of spam clicking.

Of course, if it started spam clicking, needed the APM cap raised, converted its spam into actual high EPM and Deepmind didn't lower the cap afterwards, then the article's objection holds true. But that didn't sound like what it was arguing (though perhaps I misunderstood it). Indeed, it seems to argue the reverse, that spam clicking was so ingrained that the AI never broke the habit.