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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30746 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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The Starcraft AI only crushes human experts because of its APM advantage, when they restrict it to human levels it can be beaten by elite players: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03298-6

You mean, a Starcraft AI from like a million years ago. If there were no stronger Starcraft AIs released since then, it's mostly because the top research groups lost interest in things like that, deeming the problem to be mostly solved, same as why very few people are interested in making better and better chess bots. They field moved on from Starcraft, and is now working on crushing the game of Real Life, Outside.

same as why very few people are interested in making better and better chess bots.

I would say very few people are interested in making better and better chess bots because enough people are interested in making better and better chess bots. Bot performance rose roughly linearly for decades, passed human a decade or two ago, and has continued to rise roughly linearly since.

Even that latter graph only covers through 2020, or "a million years ago" in modern AI development time, I guess. I say "roughly linearly" but of course papers and programs are released discretely; a few years gap here and there shouldn't be shocking, nor should research that focuses on one target at a time rather than trying to comprehensively compare to the state of the art in everything at once. EfficientZero (a year ago, so only a few hundred AI millennia?) results only used an Atari benchmark, but that's surely not because MuZero had already clearly reached peak performance at chess and go and shogi or because only Atari is a particularly grueling task that compares to Real Life.

Real Life Outside is obviously very important. For Example, AlphaStar became AlphaFold.

I still think that getting an AI to play 4X games at a superhuman level would be a major development. They are the most complicated and intellectually demanding games we can make in terms of mechanics. They have a deep layer of diplomacy as well. Real life is important but computer games are easy to simulate and have the machine train against itself.

Not at this point, no. It is a general consensus in the field that developing even stronger game bots is no longer “major development”. These are mostly thought of as a solved problem. This is why nobody cares about these.

I refer you to OP - somebody clearly cares about game bots! That's what we're talking about.

This is silly. The bots from the OP are fundamentally different sort of “game bot” than StarCraft or Dota or chess. This is what the industry moved on to: solving human psychology and language, directly.

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