AlphaStar interacted with the StarCraft game engine directly via its raw interface, meaning that it could observe the attributes of its own and its opponent’s visible units on the map directly, without having to move the camera - effectively playing with a zoomed out view of the gameAdditionally, and subsequent to the matches, we developed a second version of AlphaStar. Like human players, this version of AlphaStar chooses when and where to move the camera, its perception is restricted to on-screen information, and action locations are restricted to its viewable region.
I was really curious whether they would attempt moving the camera like a human. Sounds like it's still a work in progress, but very exciting! Even this isn't enough to make it fully like a human player, as I believe it is still getting numerical values for unit properties rather than having to infer them from the pixels on the screen. But it seems possible to fix that, likely at the cost of drastically increasing the training time.
The benefit of using pixels, of course, would be that the agent would become fully general. It would probably immediately work on Command & Conquer, for instance, while the current version would require deep integration with the game engine first. But I think the training time would be impractically long.
Additionally, and subsequent to the matches, we developed a second version of AlphaStar. Like human players, this version of AlphaStar chooses when and where to move the camera, its perception is restricted to on-screen information, and action locations are restricted to its viewable region.
I was really curious whether they would attempt moving the camera like a human. Sounds like it's still a work in progress, but very exciting! Even this isn't enough to make it fully like a human player, as I believe it is still getting numerical values for unit properties rather than having to infer them from the pixels on the screen. But it seems possible to fix that, likely at the cost of drastically increasing the training time.
The benefit of using pixels, of course, would be that the agent would become fully general. It would probably immediately work on Command & Conquer, for instance, while the current version would require deep integration with the game engine first. But I think the training time would be impractically long.