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DeepMind AI AlphaStar Wins 10-1 Against 'StarCarft II' Pros (newscientist.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the there's-a-first-time-for-everything dept.

In a series of matches streamed on YouTube and Twitch, DeepMind AI AlphaStar defeated two top-ranked professionals 10-1 at real-time strategy game StarCraft II. "This is of course an exciting moment for us," said David Silver at DeepMind in a live stream watched by more than 55,000 people. "For the first time we saw an AI that was able to defeat a professional player." New Scientist reports: DeepMind created five versions of their AI, called AlphaStar, and trained them on footage of human games. The different AIs then played against each other in a league, with the leading AI accumulating the equivalent of 200 years of game experience. With this, AlphaStar beat professional players Dario Wunsch and Grzegorz Komincz -- ranked 44th and 13th in the world respectively. AlphaStar's success came with some caveats: the AI played only on a single map, and using a single kind of player (there are three in the game). The professionals also had to contend with playing different versions of AlphaStar from match to match. While the AlphaStar was playing on a single graphics processing unit, a computer chip found in many gaming computers, it was trained on 16 tensor processing units hosted in the Google cloud -- processing power beyond the realms of many.

3 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Still Cheating by Luthair · · Score: 2, Informative

    Much like the dota bot from last year AlphaStar is effectively cheating as it is aware of the entire map at once, not restricted to the viewport as humans are. These are only really a novelty until they start operating on imperfect knowledge and imperfect inputs as humans are (even if it was arbitrarily limited on reaction speed).

    1. Re:Still Cheating by wlorenz65 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Wrong for the live game against MaNa. Quote: "Following the broadcast of the recorded matches, DeepMind introduced a new version of AlphaStar that MaNa took on in a live match. The agent that played the live game didn't have the benefit of the overhead camera and instead had to make decisions on where to place its focus in the same way a human would."

      But you are right for the recorded games from December 2018.

    2. Re:Still Cheating by djinn6 · · Score: 3, Informative

      It did not acquire any actual understanding of Starcraft mechanics

      If it beat professional human players, then yes it did acquire an actual understanding of Starcraft mechanics. In fact, a better understanding than humans.

      That you can train a dog to bark twice when shown 1+1, and three times when shown 2+1 does not mean the dog can do arithmetic.