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by WJW 1859 days ago
AlphaStar doesn't have maphack. It has more APM than 200 but so do the top players (and so do I on good days btw, and I'm only in Diamond 3). It does have insane mechanics that no human can match, like pixel perfect clicks every time and incredible reaction times.

One streamer (Lowko I think) analyzed a game he played against AlphaStar where it would "macro" by going to some position where you could just see all the production structures (some by only a few pixels on the edge of the screen) and just click all the button needed for unit production in a few milliseconds.

2 comments

I am aware that Nada could have 400 apm in a 30 minute game, but most of it was spam.

Those Brood War bots had 36 thousand actions per minute and mainly due to technical limitations (the game couldnt accept more). And those were "perfect" clicks - not spam.

Limiting a bot to 200 actions (or even less) makes it more comparable to human, since at some point every click becomes a resource too. Even best players have to stop macro for some (relatively short) time. While AI with 36 000 clicks per minutr is not limited by time.

I don't remember that Lowko made that video. Besatyqt made a video where AlphaStar clicked on a Barrack that was barely visible at the top of the screen, but IIRC it was only once, not a systematic trick. In my opinion, if the AlphaStar team just reduce the clickable area of the screen, it would have seam natural.