As an avid StarCraft player I still think AlphaStar is one of the most impressive AI programs ever made. While it didn't get everything quite right, it exhibited planning and creativity in it's builds, and didn't just do the same exact thing every time; it scouted and reacted to the opponent's moves with professional-level proficiency.

It didn't react it had pre-planned build orders

That's something which was mentioned when it came to deep mind team talking of all the "different agents" they had trained

As far as I understand it did actually react.

AlphaStar's training process consisted of two phases: an imitation-of-human-players learning phase that created a base set of "templates" and then self-play among agents seeded from those templates.

When creating those templates, they basically ended up with "baked-in" build orders. But self-play among agents ended up creating a variety of reactive strategies on top of those build orders, so that agents would modify them on-the-fly as the game situation changed. At a high level this is basically how humans use build orders as well.

Later refinements where still quite superhuman, just in terms of consistency not abusing stalker micro. For example it doesn’t need control groups, that’s a clear sign it’s not sticking close to human limitations.

Yeah the alpha star team didn’t really emphasise it. It’s APMs were human like in count, but they had basically 0 wasted actions, they were all meaningful. Lots of APM are used by repeat keys or mass clicking.

> Lots of APM are used by repeat keys or mass clicking.

Both of those (and more) are filtered by EAPM measures (effective APM) and even on those metrics Alphastar still had a lower EAPM count than most pros.

EAPM still includes a lot of pointless clicking by pros. Just look at periods of the game when there is nothing productive to do. By comparison a throttled Aplphastar has no need for any pointless actions and can get timings inhumanly precise which games EAPM in the other direction.

Kind of. The only reason it didn't use control groups is because it had "soft" control groups of its own (IIRC there were limits on how granular of actions it could take as well as how many distinct move commands it could issue).

I mean looking at that Serral game I don't see any superhuman micro on the part of Alphastar. Just fantastic exploitation of base layout and steadily pressing every strategic weakness Serral made in his attack.

If anything on the consistency front, Alphastar's main advantages came from superhuman macro (effectively never forgetting about making sure workers are busy), but the edge there vs human pros is pretty slight.

Effective macro requires good micro. That’s one of the reasons archon mode is such an advantage.

> steadily pressing every strategic weakness Serral made in his attack

Again a very micro limited activity. Alphastar wasn’t very superhuman in that someone could get those inputs down about that quickly, they just can’t keep the pace up over time. Endurance is one of those human limits that is often ignored when talking about esports, but it’s real and huge influence on gameplay.