[taneq]

How many of those 500 actions are actually useful? I haven't watched competitive StarCraft games for years but back when I did, rates were more like 300APM and even then the players basically spam clicked the background or selected random units non-stop and were probably only doing 50-100 actual effective actions.

[arcticfox]

> How many of those 500 actions are actually useful?

Exactly, a human doing 500 APM during intense moments is going to be way different than an AI bursting 1000 APM with pixel-precision during the most crucial moment in a game.

TLO spent a ton of time at >1000 APM and walked his army directly into enemy shots all the time. MaNa had much better control at ~400 APM. So APM is really irrelevant to control - for humans.

I suspect the AI, on the other hand, makes each action precise & count for something.

This graph, which I think was supposed to show that the AI was being "human", IMO is pretty damning. We saw the APM spike to >1000 during a critical moment and we saw the APM at <30 during lulls, so we know it uses its APM at important moments, presumably with important pixel-precise actions.

https://deepmind.com/blog/alphastar-mastering-real-time-stra...

[CydeWeys]

I suspect that once the AI becomes good enough it will be able to beat human players using a much lower total APM than human players. We're not quite there yet, but it just needs a little bit of time.

As a hopefully illustrative comparison, you could give any top player a day of play time per move against the top Chess AI being given a minute of play time per move and the AI will still win. That's how much better the AIs are than humans now. There's no reason in principle this won't be possible with StarCraft AI too.

[setr]

The biggest issue with allowing the ai to have high APM is that it will inevitably learn optimal strategies that depend on that high APM, eg stalkers can take on far more immortals than we normally expect, and the AI will learn it this way, because the high APM allows a new stalker strategy (or rather, empowers an old one greatly) while not affecting immortals significantly. This also naturally means the AI leagues see a different game balance than the human leagues, leading to strategy divergence.

And then when you drop the APM limit, suddenly all the learned optimal ai strategies start falling apart, and the whole thing has to be relearned.

More annoyingly, there’s not much for human players to learn from innovative ai strategies that are based on inhuman accuracy of play (because we couldn’t possibly execute it).

[CydeWeys]

What they're improving at right now isn't any specific AI model, it's how to train the AI models. It's meta-machine learning. I don't doubt that they can quickly train up a new model under different constraints now that they know how best to train up said models. It's not like they throw away all progress once they change some constraints; far from it.

[arcticfox]

I'm sure we'll get there too, I just think it's a little deceptive how they've measured the APM at the moment.

StarCraft is more random than chess, so I do think it's possible humans will always be able to take occasional games off of fairly constrained AIs just based off blind luck in picking counter builds, it will be interesting to see what % that is.

[vertline3]

Such high actions per minute does not seem fun to me, and possibly a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen.

[aurelwu]

the 1000 apm thing is because of a bug in how apm is calculated in starcraft2. There is a hotkey to assign all your units to a new control group while also deleting it from all other control groups which TLO extensively uses, and while it just is one key-combination to press it records as 1 action per unit which was selected. The real APM of pro players averages at 250-400 and peaks at 600-700.

[gpm]

> a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen.

Yes, I have one from it and wasn't even playing that high (I averaged less than 100 apm). I understand that it's a common problem.

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

Was Starcraft the only/main game that you played?

[gpm]

Yes, basically the only for several years at that point. A few hours here and their of other games but nothing at all substantial.

[fernandotakai]

i already had some RSI, but playing SC2 made it a lot worse (i stopped playing when i got to plat as a zerg because it required enough APM to hurt)

[dmoy]

It is why I stopped playing SC, and I was never any good anyways. Still fun, but it just hurt real bad.

[swaggyBoatswain]

I stopped playing SC competitively because it's too stressful. Both physically and mentally. Hitting 300 APM continously in a game for up to 60 minutes at a time makes your hands go numb. And the adrenaline rush makes you want to go running afterwards. With games like LoL/DoTA at least you have a chance to take a break after a gank/farming/ team wipes. With starcraft every decision has a significantly higher compounding effect

[dmoy]

Hell I never played it competitively. I had to stop playing it even casually because it physically hurt.

[cjbprime]

Wait until you hear about stringed musical instruments? :)

[jacobolus]

From what I understand, the most common string instrument problems are with shoulders/neck/back, due to sitting for long periods of time with poor posture.

Most music should be playable without excessive risk of serious injury to arms / wrists / hands, but from what I understand very high notes on e.g. the violin are hard to play without using an over-flexed wrist, which is definitely a problem if playing music requiring such a position for long stretches of time, or many rapid switches between high and low notes.

Some of the string players with most risk are novices who have not been taught proper technique.

For professional PC game players, the design of the standard computer keyboard and furniture is absolutely terrible from an RSI perspective (worse than any common musical instrument, and without any of the design requirements of acoustic instruments as an excuse), and it is shocking to me that there has not been more effort to get more ergonomic equipment into players’ hands. The way game players typically use a computer keyboard is generally more dangerous than the way typists or e.g. programmers do. As someone who spent a few years thinking about computer keyboard design, I can think of at least a dozen straight-forward and fairly obvious changes that could be made to a standard computer keyboard to make it more efficient and less risky for game players. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit here.

Whether or not the equipment is changed, the most important single thing when using a computer keyboard (or any hand tool for that matter) is to avoid more than slight wrist flexion or extension, especially while doing work with the fingers. Excessive pronation and ulnar deviation of the wrist are also quite bad. Watching pro players, many of them have their wrists in an extremely awkward position while doing fast repetitive finger motions for hours per day without breaks, which is a guaranteed recipe for RSI.

[vertline3]

Well I have heard of them, also looked up TLO mentioned above, he actually did get RSI and had to take months off.

"Liquid regretfully announces that Dario “TLO” Wünsch will be unable to play for the next few months due to the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome he experiences in both hands. He will however continue to be involved with E-Sports even as he takes a break from gaming to give his wrists time to heal. Sadly, this means that he will not be attending Dreamhack Summer or the Homestory Cup III as a player."