News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinf... by halflings on Friday November 01, 2019 @01:21AM (#21416466)
>[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.

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.

Re:Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinf... by Strom on Friday November 01, 2019 @05:41AM (#21417286)
You quoted me saying that I'm not as good as them and then you say that my statement is wrong because I'm not as good as them. We seem to be in agreement. Maybe you misread? Anyway that was just a footnote to point towards my generalist nature, because I think that's a fundamental reason why I immediately see these things while for them it takes time to realize. Also to be even more fair towards them, my generalist knowledge around computer controlled gaming goes way beyond StarCraft II as I've written bots for many different games.

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.

--

[1] https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369062832