Current key points:

• November was also AlphaStar

• the stream is showing 2 of the 5 AS vs human replays (TLO & Mana), selected for interest; the rest will be available for download. There will be 1 live match against Mana with the newest AS.

  • Catalyst map, Protoss vs Protoss (Is it not trained on any other maps or match-ups? EDIT: apparently not, specialized individual NNs)

• the discussion of map visibility/attention is confusing. What exactly is AS seeing and has access to?

• 'relentless' is a word used very often of AG, OA5, and AS, I've noticed

• architecture: 'AlphaStar League' sounds like PBT? and then DM's 'Nash' stuff is used to select a subset of the best least-exploitable agents

  Compute: 3 wall-clock days for imitation learning (very roughly human-level results, Vinyals says?); 7 days for the 'AlphaStar League'. Agents get ~200 years of SC2 samples to finetune in the league, so perhaps can roughly estimate total compute from how many individuals you need in PBT... EDIT: Silver says 16 TPUs roughly equivalent to 60 GPUs for training (the NN itself presumably, with a lot more CPU cores for the SC2 environment workers)

  As expected, a relatively small NN - ~50ms forward pass on a GPU, runnable on a desktop in realtime.

• A short history of the AS development with the matches with TLO & Mana: https://youtu.be/UuhECwm31dM

• There is an ongoing AmA with Vinyals et al; they will answer questions tomorrow, so think'em up and type'em in.

• Interesting to compare reactions to the two sets of games. Most watchers were not that impressed by the TLO shutout, pointing out he was barely in the top 100 SC2 players and playing the wrong race anyway, but seemed to be much more impressed by beating Mana; on the other hand, I was very impressed by beating TLO (because it meant the approach worked) and was unimpressed by beating Mana because all that really meant was dumping some more compute into training & maybe tweaking it some.

  From my point of view, people are vastly overrating the small absolute differences between individual human players and underrating the immense amount of work which goes into providing an approach which works at all to reach human level, after which it takes a lot less work to surpass human level... I suppose this is an example of "the narcissism of small differences" - to a sheep, other sheep look very distinct.

EDIT: current DM writeup: https://deepmind.com/blog/alphastar-mastering-real-time-strategy-game-starcraft-ii/

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Matches

September 2018, TLO results: 5-0 AS (note: TLO is not a Protoss specialist, on the other hand, that was an earlier AS playing)

1. swift AS victory over TLO, 1-base push after enduring TLO attacks on workers
2. AS victory, carriers
3. AS victory, massively heavy on disruptor units
4. AS victory
5. AS victory

December 2018, Mana results: (Mana is a Protoss specialist, playing against a further improved AS) 5-0

1. AS victory
2. AS victory
3. AS victory
4. AS victory; epic stalkers vs immortals battle at the end, but didn't work out for Mana...
5. AS victory; described as especially bizarre

January 2019, Mana exhibition match: 0/1, AS lost.

1. The one loss is interesting. What went wrong there? Did I imagine the same issues as OA5 and AG's delusions?

Total: 10/11. Wow.