Comment by saghm
2 days ago
At least when I first heard about trying to make AI play StarCraft against humans (not the built-in AI of course, which the pros wouldn't have any trouble with), there was a lot of talk about limiting their "actions per minute" to the same level as high-level human players. What confused me was the premise that someone hitting 200 APM would be doing 200 useful things per minute; as far as I was ever able to observe, a huge portion of those actions were either just to look at different things by hitting a hotkey for a unit or building in a different area or even just keeping their fingers in motion so that when they did need to do something it could flow from the movements they were already doing rather than having to actually think through starting and stopping.
People have been arguing about how useful apm actually is since roughly 5 minutes after people started measuring it.
That being said, there is a substantial difference between humans playing at anywhere from 50-500 apm and a robot that can literally micro every single zergling on the map at the same time and do things like avoid ever taking the splash damage portion of a siege tank shot.
Fair enough, that's a pretty stark difference. It sounds like the exact precision of the actions that a bot can do is pretty much beyond human abilities.