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AlphaStar AI goes 10-1 against human pros in demonstration…

Forum Index > SC2 General
374 CommentsPost a Reply
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perturbaitor
Profile Joined April 2015
2 Posts
February 02 2019 19:18 GMT
#341
On February 03 2019 03:43 Fecalfeast wrote:
Show nested quote +
On February 03 2019 02:56 perturbaitor wrote:
inside this topic
two kinds of blindness exist
state and direction

cool haiku but what does it mean?

1 post to be snarky in this thread are you polypoetes?

robot intellect
some unimpressed, flaws, unfair
disregard future
Grumbels
Profile Blog Joined May 2009
Netherlands7032 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-02-02 21:00:10
February 02 2019 20:51 GMT
#342
Can anyone help calculate the cost of training AlphaStar?

https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/pricing

They said that each agent requires 16 TPU's to train, but I don't know how many agents compete in the league. But let's assume it's about a thousand. That means 16,000 TPU's running in parallel (for reference, AlphaZero used 5,000). The maximum pricing given is $4.50 / h. That comes down to a cost of ~1.7 million dollar a day, and about 25 million dollar for the full two weeks of training, not including the initial phase of learning from replays.

But I picked the number of agents at random, maybe I'm off by an order of magnitude. And obviously Google's pricing of TPU services to outside clients is not the same as their internal assessment of its cost for in-house research teams.

Someone on Reddit said that it would cost them 25 million a day to train AlphaStar, but I don't know how that person came up with those numbers. Possibly many people within the SC2 AI or ML community have access to inside information.

But if these numbers are roughly correct, and if you assume that a functioning AI that works for all match-ups and all maps and all patches would require ten times the training, that's hundreds of millions of dollars for training an AI. And that's disregarding the labor costs of the dozens of people working on this project for the last couple of years.
Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views--amen, so be it.
shadymmj
Profile Joined June 2010
1906 Posts
February 03 2019 04:03 GMT
#343
some really moronic people in here, the point of google AI is to outthink a human, not outclick a human. no one would be impressed with an AI that can outmicro pros.

if you want an AI that uses optimal micro to beat a human player, then I'm sure the hardest blizz AI with a marine splitting/stalker blinking/roach burrow cheat would have beaten humans about 5 years ago.
There is no such thing is "e-sports". There is Brood War, and then there is crap for nerds.
pvsnp
Profile Joined January 2017
7676 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-02-03 04:28:32
February 03 2019 04:27 GMT
#344
On February 03 2019 13:03 shadymmj wrote:
some really moronic people in here, the point of google AI is to outthink a human, not outclick a human. no one would be impressed with an AI that can outmicro pros.

if you want an AI that uses optimal micro to beat a human player, then I'm sure the hardest blizz AI with a marine splitting/stalker blinking/roach burrow cheat would have beaten humans about 5 years ago.


And believe it or not, the Deepmind engineers are well aware of that. Which is exactly why they've designed AlphaStar as they have.
Denominator of the Universe
TL+ Member
Jampackedeon
Profile Joined November 2010
United States2053 Posts
February 08 2019 18:40 GMT
#345
This is the first time in a while I've taken time to watch SC2, not for lack of love of the game but lack of time, and holy shit this was fascinating!

I am much less impressed with the matchscore results (10-1) once I learned that the computer could see the whole screen at once in the first 10 games meaning that it didn't have to use its APM to adjust the screen and manipulate the amazing blink stalker micro. But, the presentation was strong and they were very transparent which I appreciate.

Probably the most interesting thing overall was that it seems to have proved a case for oversaturating mineral lines in the beginning. I was Zerg player so for me the possibilities for some of the more complex Zerg ability interactions in the future really fascinate me!
Rukis1
Profile Joined February 2019
2 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-02-08 20:12:35
February 08 2019 20:10 GMT
#346
I'm sorry but your fall back on the inhuman micro is unfair and childish argument.

1. It's an artifiticial intelligent
2. It's programmed to play in the most optimal way.
3. It's training is also inhuman, thus playing other AI will enforce inhuman tactics and most efficient inhuman am.

4. The agents playing all have different strategies, while most of them used stalkers as a majority it vastly differed in how they built around them.

Thus, when criticising Alphastar I really wish people would consider the constraints and positives it has.

You cannot say definitively that X player trained to play against Y bot will destroy it. As far as I can tell out of all 11 games, Alphastars openings were nearly flawless. It was aggressive, paid attention to buildings, units and position.

Let's consider the proxy gate game. We talk about boldly moving up the ramp but I also think many pros would do the same, considering the pressure needed in order to win that particular game. If it had not moved up that ramp, it would of lost that game. Especially since the only units it had was stalkers vs Robo, sentry and few stalkers.
Not to mention like I stated before is what Alphastar looks at in considering future probabilities and necessary actions to win.

By all means Alphastar isn't unbeatable but you are very undermining it's achievements. That's just down right ignorant and a greedy opinionated thinking.

P.S. I would make a more refined post but I'm not up for the challenge at 4am in China. I'm not arguing for or against but I really think people need to analyze this situation with more than "I think" or "it thinks". No one should be winning reviews, the point of a review is to show mistakes and weaknesses.

I also really dislike people saying if.... "If this happened then X would win." When in fact we hardly know nothing about how AlphaStar would react to the situation.

"But in the last game..." Yeah the last game was one agent, with more human like camera control. We actually don't know if the other agents would respond the same way.
Our sample pool is just to small to be critizing and arguing over optimal apm.
Eteoneus
Profile Joined February 2019
20 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-02-08 21:24:27
February 08 2019 21:21 GMT
#347
--- Nuked ---
Cyro
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United Kingdom20333 Posts
February 08 2019 22:36 GMT
#348
Since the non-handicapped versions went 10-0, I think there is no basis to say that they played with flaws that could be abused.


A very important note that most people are missing:

The version of Alphastar that dropped a game had only been trained for 7 days, vs the 14 days of the by far the most impressive one. Training for half of the time caused an MMR drop of around 1000 while using the camera interface only caused an MMR drop of around 200.
"oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
Poopi
Profile Blog Joined November 2010
France12935 Posts
February 08 2019 23:18 GMT
#349
So we have a romantic and idealized view of sc2, yet the AI subtly outplayed us and we didn’t realize it? Sounds pretty romantic to me

It’s really annoying that we didn’t get to see more games without camera, we can only guess what happened had they played 9 more games
WriterMaru
Cyro
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United Kingdom20333 Posts
February 08 2019 23:55 GMT
#350
There will probably be more games with a camera AI and further limited APM that has proper training time.
"oh my god my overclock... I got a single WHEA error on the 23rd hour, 9 minutes" -Belial88
agsub
Profile Joined May 2012
Singapore368 Posts
February 09 2019 02:12 GMT
#351
I wrote about the three significant impacts of AlphaStar from a data scientist perspective: the arrival of real-time AI, the shift beyond supervised machine learning, and the future of mutual learning between AI and humans.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-beats-human-players-starcraft-heres-why-matters-kai-xin-thia/
rockslave
Profile Blog Joined January 2008
Brazil318 Posts
February 09 2019 03:29 GMT
#352
On February 09 2019 06:21 Eteoneus wrote:
The back-propagation algorithm will not go uphill in the parameter space.


Back propagation is not an optimization algorithm. It is a technique for calculating derivatives.

What you mean is gradient descent.
What qxc said.
Eteoneus
Profile Joined February 2019
20 Posts
February 09 2019 10:35 GMT
#353
--- Nuked ---
rockslave
Profile Blog Joined January 2008
Brazil318 Posts
February 09 2019 15:34 GMT
#354
Back propagation calculates the derivatives for whatever you wanna do. You can do Netwon-Raphson, BFGS, DFP, etc. You can very well use back propagation and go uphill.

I'm just correcting your wrong terminology and you're being belligerent without reason.
What qxc said.
Eteoneus
Profile Joined February 2019
20 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-02-09 16:07:11
February 09 2019 15:54 GMT
#355
--- Nuked ---
rockslave
Profile Blog Joined January 2008
Brazil318 Posts
February 09 2019 17:41 GMT
#356
Dude, read it again. You wrote a totally nonsensical line. Back propagation does not go uphill because it does not go anywhere. You don't think it's valid to point out that you're mixing up the buzzwords, but you think it's reasonable to point out a typo? I'm not disputing the rest of your post (nor am I supporting it). Instead of getting fired up because of very local, concrete and polite criticism, you could just write "yeah I got'em mixed up".
What qxc said.
Eteoneus
Profile Joined February 2019
20 Posts
Last Edited: 2019-02-09 18:23:28
February 09 2019 18:21 GMT
#357
--- Nuked ---
rockslave
Profile Blog Joined January 2008
Brazil318 Posts
February 09 2019 19:10 GMT
#358
I didn't read your whole post, that's why I'm not disputing it. I read the very beginning and there's a glaring error there. I know very little about machine learning, but I happen to study optimization so I took my time to clarify.

Back propagation is not an optimization algorithm. It's also not "NN or ML". It's an algorithm created to differentiate functions expressed as the composition of functions whose derivatives are known. It's older than both of us and it's basically the chain rule, known for hundreds of years.

The optimization algorithm used in most neural networks is stochastic gradient descent (btw, it goes uphill sometimes because it's stochastic). It is not the only one. L-BFGS was also used with some success. It is not purely gradient based (uses second derivative information), so it also goes uphill.

If someday you decide to learn something instead of fighting people who are helping you, I suggest you read Nocedal's book, it's a very good introduction.
What qxc said.
Incognoto
Profile Blog Joined May 2010
France10239 Posts
February 09 2019 19:21 GMT
#359
On February 03 2019 05:51 Grumbels wrote:
Can anyone help calculate the cost of training AlphaStar?

https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/pricing

They said that each agent requires 16 TPU's to train, but I don't know how many agents compete in the league. But let's assume it's about a thousand. That means 16,000 TPU's running in parallel (for reference, AlphaZero used 5,000). The maximum pricing given is $4.50 / h. That comes down to a cost of ~1.7 million dollar a day, and about 25 million dollar for the full two weeks of training, not including the initial phase of learning from replays.

But I picked the number of agents at random, maybe I'm off by an order of magnitude. And obviously Google's pricing of TPU services to outside clients is not the same as their internal assessment of its cost for in-house research teams.

Someone on Reddit said that it would cost them 25 million a day to train AlphaStar, but I don't know how that person came up with those numbers. Possibly many people within the SC2 AI or ML community have access to inside information.

But if these numbers are roughly correct, and if you assume that a functioning AI that works for all match-ups and all maps and all patches would require ten times the training, that's hundreds of millions of dollars for training an AI. And that's disregarding the labor costs of the dozens of people working on this project for the last couple of years.


wait for real?
maru lover forever
Dangermousecatdog
Profile Joined December 2010
United Kingdom7084 Posts
February 09 2019 19:48 GMT
#360
Which bit is the part you are expressing shock or disbelief at?
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