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by CydeWeys 1602 days ago
Sports/eSports are more fun to watch live, because it's going on right now and you're finding out the results the same time as everyone else in the world is.

As for the SC2 bots, it sounds like they aren't very good. Chess bots, on the other hand, are, and these ones are playing a standard classical time control that is often used by human players. Time management is a super important part of this (indeed there are often separate neutral networks that are used to determine how much time should be spent thinking about a given move). The game inherently takes place live over a given window of time, and so long as that's true, why not stream it live too?

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Well, whether the SC2 bots are "good" depends on how you squint at the problem.

The framework being used was developed for Google DeepMind's AlphaStar, which is a learning AI approach although obviously very different from their approach to chess.

But today the framework is used by rules-based bots largely competing against each other. This means unlike AlphaStar, which set out specifically with a human-like approach to beat excellent human players, the amateur bots are entirely focused on winning versus other bots by any means necessary. The most successful tend to have sprawling multi-theatre conflict as their end game, maximum army size, and a half dozen or more different small skirmishes happening at once, hard for the human observer to be sure who is better until suddenly there's a decisive outcome. That wouldn't be compatible with AlphaStar's mission at all, obviously human players can't fight these battles with success.

Their most obvious defect is they don't resign. A competent human player resigns hopeless positions in SC2 knowing quickly that they have lost, but most bots will stay in the game until destroyed which would be very rude for a human. They can be indecisive, attacking then pulling back, then attacking again in seconds, and they are much more easily thrown off by unexpected situations than a human - but overall they're a match for a good human player unless that player has prepared specifically to exploit a known weakness of a particular bot. (e.g. there are bots that do not understand why an enemy Nydus Worm in your base can't be allowed to complete... since that basically never happens)