[freeflight]

But isn't the competency of a Starcraft player is also measured on his/her speed?

In that context, you can't really measure strategy without accounting for timing/speed because a lot of tactics and strategies only become viable once the player has the required speed to actually realize them aka "micro".

[b_tterc_p]

Exactly, and due to superhuman micro, the AI has cornered itself into learning a small subset of the strategy space. It’s not good at strategy because it’s optimized itself for just getting into micro-handled situations.

It’s not good at strategizing with all the options available to it given it’s micro ability, it has “one” strategy that leveraged the micro as much as it could, and when given a strategic challenge by mana, it didn’t know what to do.

[confiscate]

yes but the ultimate goal, is to make an AI as "smart", or "smarter" than a human. That's why they keep making AI's play against human players in Chess, Go etc. It's not to prove computers are faster than humans. It's to prove computers can be smart like humans.

They want to make an AI that can teach new ideas to humans. New strategies that human bodies are physically capable of executing, but no human was "smart enough" to think of yet. An example is when the AI built a high number of probes at the start. That's "smart".

The only way to train an AI to be able to come up with new ideas, is to force it to be "slow". Otherwise, it will just always do the easiest way to win, which is out-micro. There is nothing interesting about a game like that. That only shows the AI is fast, but it won't be clear that it's "smart"

[BigJono]

That's exactly why it's so important to try and constrain the system to as close to human parameters as possible. You can't compare strategic prowess if the two players are playing at a completely different level. It'd be the same as saying MaNa is better than say, Maru (who has just won 3 GSL Code S's in a row), because he has stronger strategies against ~30th percentile players. It makes no sense.

[arcticfox]

Speed is only interesting as part of fair human competition. It's trivial for the AI to win with speed and it doesn't have to be remotely smart about it. Serral (dominant world #1) was easily beat by 3 far weaker humans controlling one opponent - it wasn't even close. It's just stupid to even claim victory in those situations.

Making an AI that wins by outsmarting humans, on the other hand, is what we are all interested in.

[ajuc]

That would be right if AI and human player had the same opportunities for micro.

They don't, because AI doesn't use physical objects to move stuff in the game. AI just "thinks" that this stalker should blink and it blinks. Human player has to deal with inertia of his hand and of mouse.

If you want fair competition of micro - make a robot that watches screen through it's camera, moves mouse and presses keys to play starcraft.

Then the bandwith of the interface is the same for both players, and we can compare their micro.

[aurelwu]

you don't really need a real robot, but assign some "time cost" for various actions which depends on spatial distance and type of action and if it is a different action than the previous action. humans are really fast when for example splitting a group of units but performing multiple different actions on different areas on the screen or even multiple screens takes a lot longer. They don't need to fully emulate human behaviour but getting somewhat close would really show how strong teh AI is tactically and strategically without superhuman micromanagement.