Lex Fridman PodcastOriol Vinyals: DeepMind AlphaStar, StarCraft, and Language | Lex Fridman Podcast #20
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,006 words- 0:00 – 1:43:33
Intro
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Ariel Viñales. He's a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, and before that, he was at Google Brain and Berkeley. His research has been cited over 39,000 times. He's truly one of the most brilliant and impactful minds in the field of deep learning. He's behind some of the biggest papers and ideas in AI, including sequence-to-sequence learning, audio generation, image captioning, neural machine translation, and of course, reinforcement learning. He's a lead researcher of the AlphaStar project, creating an agent that defeated a top professional at the game of StarCraft. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now here's my conversation with Ariel Viñales. You spearheaded the DeepMind team behind AlphaStar that recently beat a, uh, top professional player at StarCraft. So, you have an incredible wealth of work in deep learning and a bunch of fields, but let's talk about StarCraft first. Let's go back to the very beginning, even before AlphaStar, before DeepMind, before deep learning. First, what came, uh, first for you, a love for programming or a love for video games?
- OVOriol Vinyals
I think for me, it definitely came first the drive to play video games. I really liked computers. I didn't really code much, but what I would do is I would just mess with the computer, break it and fix it. That was the level of skills, I guess, that I gained in my very early days, I mean, when I was 10 or 11. Um, and then I- I really got into video games, especially StarCraft, actually, the first version. I spent most of my time just playing kind of pseudo-professionally, as professionally as you could play back in '98 in Europe, which was not a very main scene like the- what's called nowadays eSports.
- LFLex Fridman
Right. Of course, in the '90s. So, uh, how'd you get into StarCraft? What- what was your favorite race? How- how do you develop- how did you develop your skill? What- what was your strategy? All that kind of thing.
- OVOriol Vinyals
So as a player, I tended to try to play not many games, not to kind of disclose the strategies that I kind of developed, and I like to play random, actually. Not in competitions, but just to... I- I think in StarCraft there's, well, there's three main races, and I found it very useful to play with all of them. Um, so I would choose random many times, even sometimes in tournaments to gain skill on the three races, because it's not how you play against someone, but also if you understand the race because you play it, you also understand what's annoying, what... Then when you're on the other side, what to do to annoy that person, to try to gain advantages here and there and so on. So, I actually played random. Although I must say, in terms of favorite race, I really like Zerg. Um, I was probably best at Zerg, um, and that's probably what I tend to use towards the end of my career before starting university.
- LFLex Fridman
So, let's step back a little bit. Could you try to describe StarCraft to people that may never have played video games, especially the massively online variety-
- OVOriol Vinyals
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
... like StarCraft?
- OVOriol Vinyals
So StarCraft is a real-time strategy game, and the way to think about StarCraft perhaps if you understand a bit, um, chess, is that there are... There's a board-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- OVOriol Vinyals
... which is called map or- or- or, like, yeah, like the map where people play against each other. There's obviously many ways you can play, but the most interesting one is the one-versus-one setup-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- OVOriol Vinyals
... where you just play against, um, someo- someone else or even the built-in AI, right? The... Blizzard put, uh, a system that can play the game reasonably well if you don't know how to play. And then in this board, you have, again, pieces like in chess, but these pieces are not there initially like they are in chess. You actually need to decide to gather resources to decide which pieces to build, so in a way you're starting almost with no pieces. You start gathering resources. In StarCraft, there's minerals and gas that you, you can gather, and then you must decide how much do you want to focus, for instance, on gathering more resources or starting to build units or pieces. And then once you have enough pieces or maybe, like, attack, um, you know, a- a good attack composition, then you go and attack, um, the other side of the map. And now the other main difference with chess is that you don't see the other side of the map, so you're not seeing the moves of the enemy. Um, it's what we call partially observable. So as a result, you must not only decide trading off economy versus building your own units, but you also must decide whether you want to scout to gather information, um, but also by scouting you might be giving away some information that you might- might be hiding from the enemy. So, there's a lot of complex decision-making, um, all in real time. There's also, unlike chess, this is not a turn-based, um, game. You play basically all the time continuously, and thus some skill in terms of speed and accuracy of clicking is also very important, and people that train for this really play this game at- at an, um, amazing skill level. I've seen many times this, and if you can witness this live, it's really, really impressive. Um, so in a way it's kind of a chess where you don't see the other side of the board, you're building your own pieces, and you also need to gather resources to basically get some money to build other buildings, pieces, technology, and so on.
- LFLex Fridman
From the perspective of the human player, the difference between that and chess, or maybe that and, uh, a game like turn-based strategy like Heroes of Might and Magic-
- OVOriol Vinyals
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... is that there's an anxiety 'cause y- you have to make these decisions really quickly, and- and, uh, if you are not actually...... uh, aware of what decisions work. It, it's a very stressful balance that you have to ... Everything you described is actually quite stressful, difficult to balance for a amateur human player. I don't know if it gets easier at the professional level, like if they're fully aware of what they have to do, but at the amateur level there's this anxiety, "Oh, crap. I'm being attacked. Oh, crap. I have to, uh, build up resources. Oh, I have to probably expand." And all these, uh, the time, the, uh, realtime strategy aspect is really stressful and computation, I'm sure, difficult. We'll get into it, but, uh, for me, Battle.net ... Uh, s- so StarCraft was released in, uh, '98, t- 20 years ago, which is hard to believe. Uh, and, uh, uh, Blizzard Battle.net with, uh, Diablo in '96 came out. And to me, I ... It might be a narrow perspective, but it changed online gaming and perhaps society forever. (laughs)
- OVOriol Vinyals
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
But I, I may have way too narrow a, a viewpoint but from your perspective, uh, can you talk about the history of gaming over the past 20 years? Is this ... How transformational, how important is this, uh, line of games?
- OVOriol Vinyals
Right. So, I think I, I kind of was an active gamer whilst this was developing, the internet, um, online gaming. So for me the, the way it came was I played other games strategy-related.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- OVOriol Vinyals
I played a bit of Command & Conquer, and then I played Warcraft II, which is from Blizzard. But at the time, I didn't know. I didn't understand about what Blizzard was or anything. Warcraft II was just a game which is, which was actually very similar to StarCraft in many ways. It's also a realtime strategy game, um, where there's orcs and humans, so there's only two races.
- LFLex Fridman
But it was offline.
- OVOriol Vinyals
And it was offline, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- OVOriol Vinyals
So, I remember a friend of mine came to, to school saying, "Oh, there's this new cool game called StarCraft." And I just said, "Oh, this sounds like just a copy of Warcraft II," um, until I kind of installed it. And at the time, um, I, I am from Spain so we didn't have inter- like, very good internet, right? So there was ... For us, StarCraft became first kind of an offline experience where you kind of start to play these missions, right? You play against some sort of scripted things, uh, to, to de- develop the story of the characters in the game.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- OVOriol Vinyals
Um, and then later on I started playing against the built-in AI, um, and I thought it was impossible to defeat it. Then eventually you defeat one and you can actually play against seven built-in AIs at the same time, which also felt impossible. But actually, it's not that hard to beat seven built-in AIs at once. So once we achieved that, also we discovered that we could play ... Um, as I said, internet wasn't that great, but we could play with a LAN, right? On, like basically against each other if we were in the same place, because you could just connect machines with, like, cables, right? Um, so we started playing in LAN mode and w- against, you know, as a group of friends, and it was really, really, like, much more entertaining than playing against AIs.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- OVOriol Vinyals
And later on, as internet was starting to develop and being a bit faster and more reliable, then it's when I started experiencing Battle.net, which is this amazing universe not only because of the fact that you can play the game against anywhere, anyone in the world, but you can also get to know more people. You just get exposed to now, like, this vast variety of ... It's kind of a bit when the chats came about, right? There's, there's a ... There was a chat system. You could play against people, but you could also chat with people not only about StarCraft but about anything. And that became a way of life for kind of two years, um, a- a- and, and obviously then it became like kind of it exploded in mean that I started to play more seriously, going to tournaments and so on and so forth.
- LFLex Fridman
Do you have a sense on a societal, sociological level what's this whole part of society that many of us are not aware of? And it's a huge part of society, which is gamers. I mean, um, uh, every time I come across that in YouTube or streaming sites, I mean, this is a hu- the huge number of people play games r- religiously. Do you have a sense of those folks, especially now that you've returned to that realm a little bit on the AI side?
- OVOriol Vinyals
Yeah. So, uh, in fact, I, uh, even after StarCraft, I actually played World of Warcraft, which is maybe the-
Episode duration: 1:46:00
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