As a computer scientist, I find this AI very fascinating. As a SC2 fan, I love the attention the game is getting from this. As a Lowko subscriber, I love the casting that comes with it. Win-win-win?

We are teaching robots how to control armies and use tactics and strategy. This will obviously end well.

13:10 "I don't think it's going too much at all" AlphaStar: *laughs in 755 APM*

getting to grandmaster without understanding that you can only place creep tumors on creep

One different thing for alpha star and it's apm is that those are calculated commands where a human has inflated numbers as they have to do a lot of check ups and many redundant presses so when the AI hits 500 apm... that is kinda scary

Tbh I would like to see unrestricted Alphastar vs ~5 pros on Archon mode at the end of big tournaments. That could be sick!

Lowko: i don't think it's gonna peak that much Alpha star: shoots up to 740 apm

Alpha Star's real power is that crazy expansion power: it's building even during the intense fights, so its economy can power through even a whole bunch of setbacks. Seriously, watch the money, it NEVER floats any.

AlphaStar didnt even upgraded the hatchery!!! He beat a Grand Master player with Level 1 Army. Thats something very interesting.

"Today is time for something special" Oooo, Time vs Special? Oh, well this is cool too! I did see the video name but for some reason after that first sentence, I thought it was a lead in to introduce those players.

I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords

Lowko! This is so cool that you were able to confirm that you played alphastar! Good job beating it too. thats very impressive. I main zerg (diamond 3) and let me tell you, your hotkey setup is way better than mine but i have been using the control groups a certain way for a long time. That is really hard to re-program your brain to change. Your micro and macro is impressive as well. Im glad to be part of a community of the coolest game on the planet!

Thank you for the video Lowko! I'd love to hear more about Alpha Star. And perhaps a video for another matchup? I love your videos. You seem so genuine and excited and that adds a lot as entertainment for me.

Yes! Finally one of Alphastar games with some lowko treatment! :D

So basically a computer opponent that doesnt 'break' after a time

It is awesome to watch AlphaStar playing because it does things we just don't see other people do (and they work!) pretty much *"are you not entertained?!"* style! And having Lowko explaining WTH is going on is absolutely vital to me, I couldn't ever tell otherwise! Thanks, Lowko!!! Please cast more of these if possible! =)

10:40 Gotta love how Alpha keeps his lings in the back as a reserve instead of suiciding into the archons

hey lowko, turned out u were fighting against alphastar as well and won :) that was so funny when i noticed ur game in that list. awsome.

Love these alphastar games, it's so interesting to see what the AI does! Let's take a look, gonna be awesome for sure :D

It has begun... let me know when we have buyable android maids

Protoss played a pretty solid early game and killed over 20 drones and AlphaStar did 0 damage and still it was ahead... that's insane

Near the end. You talked a lot about how the AI can help pros come up with the perfect build orders, perfect timing attacks etc.. That had me thinking. Couldn't the AI also help Blizzard design a perfectly balanced Starcraft 3? :O

I liked the fact alpha shot the corrosive in volleys and not all at once, reminds me of that strategy nobunaga used vs the sanada cavalry with the riflemen.

So much work and effort put on that I.A. That it not only learned how to play a game, but also counter and micro its army. I wonder where this will lead us in the future. Anyway, that was an unusual match and opponent. You don’t see every day something like an IA playing a game being casted!

Thanks for the post match commentary, a huge plus. I have taken the plunge and am doing 1v1 vs the AI (for now). Didn't realize how much I abstract just watching. Playing has made me realize how damn amazing the pro gamers are. Oh, am 52, so was about 32 when SC came out and was a mid tier player way back then. My 47 apm won't get me far, but that's up about double after about 25 games, so there's a chance at taking Serral down......yeah, right.

19:00 maybe the Ai can't "see" what the stargate is making based on outline alone? Even though it is discernible visually doesn't mean it has a reading the ai can pick up.

The chain of biles was one of the most beautiful things I've seen, and I don't even play Zerg. More players should use biles to advance like that.

Skynet Alpha looking great. Next stop: nuclear launch simulation. Wait a freaking minute!!!

I have taken it's Protoss strategy and wont a few games myself. It has tactics that works. Straight up.

Yes, I enjoyed this video. Thank you

thank you for not rapidly pausing 100 times for extended periods. im talking to you artosis

I want a starcraft 2 scripting league where everything is allowed as long as you don't break any game rules(built times, costs, vision, etc...). Where alphastar can go wild APM wise and humans are allowed to use macros like advanced ques and stuff. Examples: like: select hive build drone, wait 20 seconds build another drone etc or: toggle macros like: always produce a drone if larva is maxed and minerals over x. Or auto retreat on x% health(this one is actually in vanilla warzone2100 it can be set for any unit individually for 70/50/20 i think)

It does play like a human. Incredible. I hope Deepmind doesn't feed alpha star any pre-known tactics and let it develop all strategies organically to see what AI can come up with.

What kind of computer do you have that can run a replay at 8x faster at 60 fps?

An AI so good that they had to severely limit it. I imagine that it can somehow fight 7 grandmasters in an FFA unrestricted

Hey Lowko, I always watch your videos and I would like to ask you something. In this game, when Alphastar loses its army of ravagers, you can clearly see that, on the back of that fight, it is now not only ahead in army but mining nearly 10x more since whenever, so "resources lost" loses all importance when trying to see who is ahead. It seems to me the indicators we can use on replays are really incomplete. The "resources lost" indicator is only useful when both players are mining equally, and the mining per minute is also hard to gauge. Don't you think blizzard could simply implement a measurement that actually indicates who is ahead, as in: (total resources mined) - (total resources lost)? As I see it, this would be the number 1 indicator, although the others have a bit of use.

It is really remarkable the level of ingenuity that goes on in 5:00, when you say that an AI that has been playing against itself for something that was estimated to be 200 years, "May have not seen this build very often since *humans* came up with this build just a couple of months before." Humans found local optima to the starcraft problem: how many workers you need, at what time to attack or build something, the need for harrassment for a successful game, etc etc. Someone automated a solver to this problem and found that the solutions found by humans are indeed local optima, since the machine converged to similar solutions.

21:15 no that is incorrect, it at some point a month or 2 depending on the server power, will cap out. as you can see 1 weakness is creep spread. This i imagine is cos its not thinking its getting a giant boost from it late game by covering the map in creep. or maybe its not using creep cos its basically saying it's to risky cos you might lose a creep spore, hindering it self late game.

Lowko, while saying it's not unheard of to have that 500 apm peak: Please consider that the ai doesn't spam. Even a 700 apm is less effective from a human player, than 300 hundred from the ai. The other thing you could notice, that pro players do tire out from fighting.. They take little breaks if they can, as our brain runs out of fuel. It should be restricted more, but it's definitely a great improvement.

The thing about AIs is that there are two fields where a human will never be able to match them, even with how much they've tried to pair down AlphaStar to mimic human limitations. Precision Targeting: when it tries to target something, it will not miss. Against a human player, mixing in Overseers with your Vipers will provide some protection against , say, Templars using Feedback because a human will occasionally click an Overseer instead of a Viper. Against AlphaStar, it will only hit the Overseer if and when it wants to, it will warp its Stalkers exactly where it thinks they should be, and it will drop its Psionic Storms just so to catch as many units in it as possible. Precision Timing: It knows exactly how long everything takes. Cooldowns, attack speed, build and travel times; if it can squeeze out a little bit more efficiency, one more shot before moving out from under a Corrosive Bile, one more round of Zerglings before launching an attack, 10:37 juggling cooldowns like some kind of circus performer, there's really no way to stop it. These are the kind of things that can't be done unless you can single out pixels and count milliseconds, both of which an AI does by its very nature and can't be realistically coded out of its playstyle. Still, I kind of want to see what would happen if AlphaStar were entered into a major tournament, and whether the Pros can out think the Deep Mind even with the human handicaps. Maybe donate its winnings (if any) to charity?

at 21:00 it almost reminds me of how chess evolved after engines analyzed positions... is AI going to evolve how RTS games are played ?

Hope you make more AlphaStar videos :)

When it is announced that the replay will be released. My first question is that will Lowko go through them all to find out whether or nor He did really play against Alphastar. And he did. Never disappoint Lowko :)))

if Alpahstar can get that kind of MMR with APM restrictions, it is basically already unbeatable without.

I'm pretty sure it already has influenced pro play. I think it was AlphaStar's use of 3 Disruptors in PvZ that brought that strategy into the pro meta for PvZ.

To clarify, the majority of moves by AlphaStar look human because it was trained on human replays first before moving on to playing itself. What would really be great is if AlphaStar could 100% train itself free of human influence. The results of this human-free method so far have not been very effective. But that's the holy grail.

For what I understand, AlphaStar has to manage one more ressource, APM. Also, did it use control groups ?

I would love to see alpha star uploaded to custom games and adjust its difficulty (maybe top amount of action per minute?) because it would be an amazing training tool.

Amazing and fascinating. I really don't understand how it works, but why does alphastar sometimes do some super random move that will obviously not work (e.g. try to put creep tumor off from creep)? Just losing some of his APM, and I cannot imagine any reason to do it

Lowko: Today it is time for something SpeCial! Me: You mean it's time for something MajOr? :)

how often do Lowko change his tshirt?

My dream is that alphastar becomes a real part of the game so you can practice with it. Maybe you can choose against which agent your playing against and it would be super nice if there were against for gold and generell lower league players, but still human like. I would love to see it becoming a real part of the game ❤️

There was only a couple of tells that could hint at this being AlphaStar (like the attempt to spread creep :P). Would like to see you cast a couple of others, to get your opinion on them.

Wow, Alphastar’s corrosive bile shots are way more effective now than before. The replays I’ve seen before of it using ravagers were hilariously bad in terms of effective biles.

With Alphastar Blizzard could make changes and check if the change make the race OP. A* needs to train to exploit the change, but it is just CPU time in the end. This is really fascinating stuff. I am so happy Google guys chose Starcraft2 for this, so many things to learn, for a game that started only ~20years ago.

omg Lowko flexing without spoiling the outcome of his match with AlphaStar hahahaha "Yeah I got a game against AlphaStar and you can watch the replay. They re-named me to "Master" or "GrandMaster" something along those lines ;)" CHEEKY CHEEKY

I would really, really like to be able to choose to play vs. Alpha Star to practice some time

I am pretty sure that those creep tumours were BM tumours to force the opponent to GG out.

The clip at 13:23 has been featured in the Netflix documentary "Unknown: Killer Robots" at 32:48!

Lowko, can you do one more of these? Can you do it with Alphastar’s viewport?

18:50 I dont think AlphaStar can see visual cues like the blue flicking light of the Oracle or Phoenix, can it?

Is there a match of alphastar zerg vs alphastar protoss?

Nature is a highly respected scientific journal lol For comparison it would be like me saying, “Oh yeah that guy? He plays some strategy game called Star Craft. Kinda like checkers.”

Hey Lowko? You might want to switch the display to EPM instead of APM when dealing with AlphaStar

I think AlphaStar will cause the meta to evolve with regard to eagerness to make expansions. I think it's something humans do poorly because we're naturally risk averse and expanding when you're weak feels very wrong. But I've seen some games where it expands while being immortal dropped, for example, and it makes a ton of sense to just ignore the drop and focus efforts on getting bases 3, 4, 5.

Maybe I'm just naive, but how hard is it to pack a keyboard and mouse, then customize a few settings?

It'd cool to see the AI with less limitations or levels of limitations, then have more than multiple people control 1 player. So players will have delegated duties and will be on a discord call. Then see how much players can AlphaStar handle and how insane the battle would be with several battle happening all around the map.

Those Corrossive Biles are insane!

Hey Lowko, have you seen the new Carbot t-shirt design; just thought you might look good with Leni in your front pocket 😁

YESSS ! Another super AI video! ALL HAIL the future SKYNET !

Great video. When talking about Serral having a hard time with Alphastar, it's fun to mention that BeastyQT managed to win 5 out of 7 games I believe. He's pretty good.

I think the way AI could most benefit pros is as practice partners. Say you really want to practice against a specific opening or strategy.

Roaches and ravagers are smashing immortals...This is the glory day of Zerg!

This reminds me of the computer chess craze. Companies trying to create the best chess ai to be the chess grand masters. Would be cool to have something like that with starcraft.

I want so badly to see AlphaStar vs AlphaStar in a large-scale micro battle between marine / medivac & stalker / sentry.

I made over 8000 online matches back then and archieved the daimond league three times. You might think: "what's so special about that?". Well, I made it with less than 20 (twenty!) APM ...

In the future we are just gonna use Alphastar as a robot that mines minerals

If it is indeed supervised learning then it will never be more than human because the agent learn from the replay and it can only mimics the gameplay of those replay, maybe mixing them in order to choose the most probable action.

So in like a couple months AlphaStar will learn everything and become a god again.

OK Lowko. Do you know what the turing test is?

6:18 I have feeling alphastar let this one ling die so he have even count of lings, so he save up 1 supply

Ah, yes, Nature, the science blog, I love their recipes

I kinda want to see what an alphastar vs alphastar mid to late game looks like. In the beginning it would be mirrored sure but what would they do to gain the upper hand on the other AI

I guess it could also be used as a tool for Blizzard to analyse the impact of a balance patch on the meta before releasing it !

what would be nice to see when ai vs ai but with alphastar maybe the same race too

Does "Alpha S" uses each unit separately?

I would love to see a match Alphastar vs Alphastar _without_ the human constraints.

4:55 It all looked human-like until they clicked a barrack on the screen margin, followed up by lifting up and microing all the building and SCV droping to your base to kill your queen.

When AlphaStar was able to play Terran, they will call it Skynet.

Have you covered the alphastar v serral match?

It'd be kinda interesting if they had multiple AI that grew like AlphaStar, so we could have both pro gamer tournaments and AI tournaments, so we could learn from super AI tactics

are you saying zerg species or zerg pieces?

So you're telling me I could lose a bunch of drones early and still win. Lol

As somebody working with/programming machine learning algorithms ("Artifical Intelligence" is actually "Machine Learning", to be scientifically correct): IMHO it's immitating a human, not understanding the human. You can see what happened with it building terran buildings where it understands that bunkers should be in a line, but not why. It also only reacts to the opponents build order instead of thinking ahead itself, at least in many games it gets stuck in a build when the opponent does not show his structures or units. Let's see if that improved.

So... basically be aggressive and you'll brick the AI's insane micro tendencies which unlinearily escalate

Yesterday I started watching AS replays on my computer. I much prefer that because I can put the vision from AS's POV and watch like that. Today I watched one of the diamond player replays and if that's diamond I will never reach diamond. iirc it's game 4 in that folder duration about 22 mins

Who is Alphastar is machine robot? Pls answer to me

At least they didn't name him GrandMasterBaiter for the memes...

Its now confirmed. LOWKO MADE IT STRONGER.

Wonder if they have alphastar vs alphastar without restrictions. That will be some very crazy micro fight.