You can also see in replays that the AI often makes mechanical mistakes, missing spells, missing units, even ordering wrong units from outside the screen - so it surely seems that if it's win rate was conditioned in any strong way on its sheer mechanical ability, it would have learned to not make any such mistakes. Since the mistakes are clearly there - it seems that its power comes primarily from somewhere else, likely from the AI ability to choose the right actions, not from mechanical power of executing them perfectly.
Thus it is not likely that "this artificial intelligence is still under significacnt artificial motor skills welfare". They have consulted top players before they set this AI up, and if those details were important, they would have baked them into the limitations list already.
Also I think you overestimate the AI/IT knowledge of these top players that they're consulting. I have great respect towards them, but they're not renaissance men [2] who both play 10 hours of StarCraft per day and also know the subtleties of how computers work, not to mention bleeding edge AI. You can watch the previous showmatch [3] to see how DeepMind people lack knowledge of StarCraft and how the pro players they're consulting lack understanding of the AI and both are learning new things live on air. Its obvious that their cooperation is bearing fruit as they spend more time talking to each other, as evidenced by the new APM limits. However I'm willing to bet that they would reach many more good conclusions if they just continue working together.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering
[2] The problem with both parties (the pros & deepmind) is that they're so overspecialized. I'm nowhere near as good as them at their respective fields, but I am a professional programmer and diamond in StarCraft II. In addition I've built StarCraft II AI myself, although with different goals related to finding optimal strategies.
Certainly the game is different, meta has changed, etc. But he's definitely not an amateur and is probably in the top percentile of players.
So many things wrong with this comment.
You're nowhere near a professional StarCraft player if you're in Diamond league (I play casually and I'm on high plat, bordering Diamond), and Oriol Vinyals, the lead research scientist behind this project, is one of the most renowned scientists in the field and used to play StarCraft at a professional level. They also said that other employees at DeepMind are at Masters level, and helped test the AlphaStar.
My main argument revolves around APM. Oriol Vinyals might be great, but I've also seen him make a statement on video in 2019 [1] how restricting the AI based on average APM during the whole game is reasonable. He has blindspots that someone like me can immediately spot.
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You must be one of the people who think really tv programs were really real.
The AI is supposed to call this API. Then actions per minute would be irrelevant.
Since players take so many actions during the course of the game (well into the tens of thousands), inevitably some clicks will be sub-optimal, and they all have a tiny impact on the outcome. Some professional players do specific exercises to improve their clicking accuracy in order to gain efficiency by reducing misclicks, but generally clicking accuracy is not considered a big factor compared to raw speed. Most players try to attain the highest possible clicking speed while maintaining an accuracy level that is "good enough".
I'm happy to see that they've greatly improved the APM cap. During the earlier showmatch they had an extremely naive cap on the average APM during the whole game. Which meant that the AI could take it easy for most of the time and then during battle sequences hit peaks of 2000 APM. Also the previous cap was based on the in-game APM counter, which doesn't count some things like moving the camera, which is now addressed. The current state sounds a lot better.
However it seems still superhuman in mechanical non-strategy ways, e.g. a human can misclick (click too early/late when moving the mouse, or just miss the target with the cursor completely) or do accidental double clicks etc. These end up being very costly mistakes against a zero mechanical mistake AI. Which in turn means that the AI can win with an inferior strategy due to the extra gains it has via superior mechanical accuracy. In other words this artificial intelligence is still under significacnt artificial motor skills welfare, and thus even if it starts beating pro players we shouldn't be too quick to talk about how it's the intelligence part that got it the win.
All of that said, I'm liking the progress and am excited to see what they achieve with this next. Would love another showmatch against pro players.