Maybe what usaphp is getting at is that the AI could still gain an advantage by doing a set of actions much faster than humanly possible in just a fraction of a second as long as it kept its total number of actions that minute below the cap.
Exactly. Most actions in idle game mode (i.e. when there's no active battle, micro or macro to be done) are null, the gamers simply repeat random meaningless keystrokes; this helps with being always alert and ready for anything that requires a rapid response.
> this helps with being always alert and ready for anything that requires a rapid response.
I always wondered why they do that, just spam meaningless things like open/close the stats window or click on the background. Some WoW PVPers did it too (like Laintime, I think it was - played a warrior and ran around spamming the character window open/closed an mashing 'weapon swap' even when there was no earthly reason to do so). I figured it was just the result of too much caffeine for 18 hours a day.
This sounds like it's more an equivalent of tennis players' dancing/hopping around, or martial artists doing their ducking/weaving thing?
A 65MPH speed limit doesn't mean I can go 100MPH for some section of the road, and 30MPH for another section and still be in compliance.
Similarly, an APM limit wouldn't directly imply that the kind of "gaming" that you're talking about, where a user/agent simply has to have an average APM over a certain period to be in compliance.
usaphp's point seems to be that the period should be less than one minute. When the police measure your speed with radar they are not waiting an hour to average your speed. The same idea applies here.
Yep, I entirely understand the point. Consider that when the police measure your speed, they're still measuring in MPH. Just because the units contains a specific time-frame (hours), doesn't mean the measurement is made over an hour.
Similarly, just because the units for APM contains a specific time-frame (minutes) doesn't mean the measurement must be made over a minute. A 150APM limit doesn't necessarily mean that the running average over a minute must stay below 150 actions any more than a 65MPH speed limit doesn't mean that the running average over an hour must stay below 65MPH. If a police officer catches you going faster than 65MPH even for a single second (or however long a radar gun takes), they can pull you over.
The units of a measurement do not dictate how the measurement is made.
You say you understand the point but you seem to have entirely missed it, the same problem remains.
The point of the APM limit is presumably to fairly emulate a human player, but the APMs for humans are obviously averaged over a minute.
However, for certain things humans can initiate actions in SC2 in quick succession that, if sustained over a greater time period, would yield a ridiculous APM rate. Think a Terran player highlighting the barracks and tapping "A" really fast, say with a 10ms delay, that would result in 600 APM.
Let's say a human can build 5 marines like that in quick succession. You're going to have to allow for temporary spikes in APM to not unfairly give the human player an advantage.
But if you do that the computer is able to really rapidly execute more complex actions that the human can't because he's limited by the SC2 UI, whereas every action via the API is equally difficult for the computer. E.g. moving 3 different subgroups of marines out of the way of a High Templar Storm. I doubt any human player could select 3 different subgroups of marines from one big group and move them out of the way in 3 different directions within the span of 60ms (10ms for each action of select/move for 3x groups).
So any "fair" APM limit really needs to be dynamic in some way, or at least take into account the complexity of actions (say highlighting a group v.s. tapping "A"). It's not at all obvious how to do this while retaining fairness and not giving either the human or the computer an unfair advantage.
> the APMs for humans are obviously averaged over a minute
This is wrong. I don't know the exact number, but APM is averaged over around a second. I suspect this is done because APM is a more meaningful compared to APS, for humans at least.
You still end up with a computer that can perform 3 actions all within the first millisecond of a second and still end up with human-like 180 APM (3 APS), even though no human could replicate what it just did.
How is that any different than someone who goes 100MPH and then 20MPH and claims to have not violated a 65MPH rule because the average speed was 60MPH for the trip?
The units of the measurement do not dictate how the measurement is made.
Because when the cops measure your speed they can do so in an arbitrarily small time period of their choosing, and inertia and power requirements mean you can't be going 1000 MPH one milliseconds and 10 MPH the next.
You could decide to measure APM by saying that the time difference between any two actions extrapolated to sustaining that rate over a minute or seconds couldn't exceed the APM or APS, but as I've explained such a measurement would unfairly give the human player an advantage because humans are capable of bursts they couldn't sustain over longer periods.
APM isn't averaged over a minute time frame. I don't know the exact calculations they use ( and it has been changed a couple of times) but roughly, if you go above 5 actions per second your APM will be shown as 300.
I believe the reason they use APM over APS is because 3.4 APS isn't as meaningful as 204 APM.
Well it means the AIs could exploit it a bit by issuing hundreds of actions in the first millisecond and then waiting 59.99 seconds. I'm not sure how much of an advantage that would be though.
