[gamegoblin]

I watched all of the event live and I feel that that graph is deceptive. If a game is 15 minutes and has 3 main battles lasting 15 seconds each, and you use 100 average APM on non-battle time and 1000 APM during battles, your average APM will be 145 but you obviously have a superhuman advantage.

This is compounded by the fact that almost all of AlphaStar’s actions are “useful” whereas a significant amount of the human actions are spammy.

You will typically see a human select a group of units, and fast-click a location in the general direction they want the units to move (to get them started moving that way), and then keep clicking to continuously update the destination to a more precise location. Every click counts as an action. An AI can be perfectly precise and “clicks” the right place the first time.

[dlubarov]

TLO seems to have a longer tail than AlphaStar in that graph though, so doesn't that imply that TLO peaked at an even higher APM, presumably during battles?

Fair point about humans needing minor adjustments though. Another comment also mentioned a bug in the APM measurement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18994350

[georgeek]

TLO is a Zerg player, so he probably does a lot more errors when playing Protoss. Also, every top player estimates when to do a sequence of actions and spams it a few times to maximize the chance of execution. Meanwhile Alphastar only has to do that once.

[integricho]

Yes,could that bug be the reason for the AI getting to 1000APM?

[jacobush]

Hm, should be interesting to force the AI to use input commands through a "filter", where it can only execute orders with human level precision. And something similar for input.