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How a Computer Game Is Reinventing the Science of Expertise
An anonymous reader writes "Cognitive scientists at Simon Fraser University and UCSD are beginning to use StarCraft 2 replays to study the development of expertise and the cognitive mechanisms of multitasking. Unlike similar expertise studies in chess that consider roughly a dozen players, these studies include thousands of players of all skill levels — providing an unprecedented amount of data on how players move from 'chumps to champions.'"
Well of course a novel play would slow them down. The reason they are so fast is because they no longer thing about the normal stuff, it is ingrained like a champion chess player. But that does not mean that they are unable to cope with the never seen before.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
As a daily SC2 ladder player, I can definitely state that APM has little to do with skill. It's a useful metric to determine how well a skilled player can execute his strategy but that's it. It doesn't, in any way, indicate whether a player can dynamically adjust his play to beat his opponent. It just means that if he can come up with a sufficient strategy, that he will probably be able to make it happen (assuming, of course, his opponent doesn't throw a wrench into the works). So, it scares me that anyone doing research in this field would put so much weight into APM.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
You're half-right. Many of those "useless" actions actually do have a purpose: to keep up your pacing. It's easier to keep up clicking maniacally the entire game than to repeatedly accelerate and decelerate as the demands in the game go up and down. That's why you see people spamming clicks at the beginning of the game. Sure, by themselves clicking on the minerals a whole bunch is pointless, but it acts as a warm-up for the rest of the game.