Human-beating StarCraft 2 AI will compete anonymously in Europe

DeepMind’s professional StarCraft 2-playing AI is set to play against human players in the European competitive ladder.

StarCraft 2 is a complex real-time strategy game that can still throw surprises at you even years after playing. In other words, StarCraft 2 is great for testing an AI.

Back in January, AI News reported DeepMind’s so-called ‘AlphaStar’ AI beat professional human eSports players Grzegorz Komincz and Dario...

11 July 2019 | DeepMind

AI is now creating sports for puny humans to play

A benevolent AI has begun creating some new sports for humans to keep their puny selves occupied with.

Most sports have been established for some time and ‘new’ ones are generally just similar but with some tweaked rules.

Design agency AKQA set out to create a truly new sport with help from an AI – meet, Speedgate.

Speedgate features six-player teams (take that, five-a-side lovers...) which compete on a field with three open-ended gates.

To...

15 April 2019 | Entertainment

Humans won a Dota 2 round against OpenAI! But lost overall

Humans stepped up and beat a Dota 2-playing AI created by Elon Musk-founded OpenAI in one round, despite losing overall.

AI News first reported of OpenAI’s gaming prowess in August 2017 when it took on three of the best Dota 2 players in the world and won.

The AI learned how to play the game from scratch and was able to beat regular players within the space of an hour. Professional gamers put up more of a fight, with the AI requiring two weeks of training to beat some...

15 April 2019 | Gaming

DeepMind’s AI bested in Atari game Montezuma’s Revenge

DeepMind’s AI has been setting records and beating humans in complex games for some time now, but it’s met its match in Montezuma’s Revenge.

Back in 2015, DeepMind attempted to play various Atari games. The AI was competent in most of the games and became as good at Video Pinball as a human player.

DeepMind notoriously struggled with Montezuma’s Revenge, a notoriously complex game from the 1980s. The AI was unable to learn a path and retrieve even the first...

1 February 2019 | Gaming

DeepMind thrashed pro StarCraft 2 players in latest demo

DeepMind’s AI demonstrated last night how its prowess in StarCraft 2 battles against professional human players has grown in recent months.

The live stream of the showdowns was viewed by more than 55,000 people.

“This is, of course, an exciting moment for us,” said David Silver, a researcher at DeepMind. “For the first time, we saw an AI that was able to defeat a professional player.”

DeepMind created five versions of their ‘AlphaStar’ AI. Each AI...

25 January 2019 | Gaming

DeepMind’s AI will show off its new StarCraft 2 skills this week

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....

23 January 2019 | Gaming

AI beats AI: AlphaZero becomes the best game player in history

DeepMind – a UK-based subsidiary of Google’s parent organisation Alphabet – has beat rival AI records with AlphaZero. The AI, introduced by DeepMind in a research published in Science on 6th November 2018, was put against three of the world’s most complex board games and their current AI record holders. This included world-champion chess AI Stockfish, DeepMind’s very own AlphaGo Zero – known as the best Go player in history – and elmo, winner of the 27th annual World Computer...

10 December 2018 | Gaming

Nvidia’s AI can turn real-life videos into 3D renders

Nvidia has developed an AI which can turn real-life videos into 3D renders – making creating games and VR experiences simpler. Creating 3D renders is a painstaking and time-consuming process requiring specific skills and can be incredibly costly. By reducing the barriers, Nvidia could enable more ideas to move from concept into reality. During the NeurIPS AI conference in Montreal, Nvidia set up a dedicated area showing its technology. The company used its DGX-1 supercomputer for the...

4 December 2018 | Entertainment

E3 2018: Xbox FastStart uses machine learning to get into content faster

During its E3 2018 presentation, Xbox announced it's taking advantage of Microsoft’s machine learning expertise for its FastStart feature. FastStart learns how gamers play and what files are needed to be downloaded first. Microsoft claims this can half the time it takes for a user to get into their new content — if it previously took 30 minutes to download and play, it will now take just 15 minutes. Xbox has long had a similar ‘Ready to Start’ system where games can be played...

11 June 2018 | Gaming

AI can be used to build virtual worlds

Building video games is a long and laborious process, but it could soon be quickened with the use of AI to build virtual 3D landscapes. A team of researchers from the Universities of Lyon and Purdue, along with game developer Ubisoft, have published a paper detailing how this works. Games are an art form, and creative designers take a lot of pride in their work. As such, they will work closely with everyone working on the project to make sure their visions get brought to life as...

24 November 2017 | Gaming