DeepMind has been continuing to train its AI in the ways of StarCraft 2 and will show off its most recent progress this week.
StarCraft 2 is a complex game with many strategies, making it the perfect testing ground for AI. Google’s DeepMind first started exploring how it can use AI to beat the world’s best StarCraft players back in 2016.
In 2017, StarCraft’s developer Blizzard made 65,000 past matches available to DeepMind researchers to begin training bots. Blizzard promised it would make a further half a million games available each month.
We’ve seen DeepMind’s AI bots in action with various degrees of success. The AI had a tendency of immediately rushing its opponents with ‘workers’ in a behaviour that Blizzard called “amusing,” but confessed it had a 50 percent success rate even against StarCraft 2’s AI bots on ‘insane’ difficulty.
Fed with some replays from human players using more complex strategies, the AI began adopting them.
“After feeding the agent replays from real players, it started to execute standard macro-focused strategies, as well as defend against aggressive tactics such as cannon rushes,” Blizzard said.
We’re yet to see these new strategies being used by DeepMind’s AI but it won’t be much longer until we do.
“It’s only been a few months since BlizzCon but DeepMind is ready to share more information on their research,” Blizzard said today.
“The StarCraft games have emerged as a ‘grand challenge’ for the AI community as they’re the perfect environment for benchmarking progress against problems such as planning, dealing with uncertainty, and spatial reasoning.”
You can find a stream of DeepMind’s AI playing StarCraft 2 via StarCraft’s Twitch or Deepmind’s YouTube at 6pm GMT/10am PT/1pm ET on January 24th.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and their use cases? Attend the co-located AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.
