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 Wunsch.

AlphaStar is now taking a virtual trip to Europe where it will begin playing a “small number” of games on the StarCraft 2 competitive ladder. Human players won’t even be aware they’re playing against the AI as it will be anonymised.

Blizzard explained the reasoning behind the anonymisation:

“Having AlphaStar play anonymously helps ensure that it is a controlled test so that the experimental versions of the agent experience gameplay as close to a normal 1v1 ladder match as possible.

It also helps ensure all games are played under the same conditions from match to match. DeepMind will release the research results in a peer-reviewed scientific paper along with replays of AlphaStar’s matches.”

AlphaStar was trained on historic game footage that StarCraft’s developer Blizzard has been releasing on a monthly basis. Five versions of the AI battled each other to hone their skills in training which equates to around 200 years for a human.

Multiple experimental variants of AlphaStar will take part in the test and it will play 1v1 matches only. The test will be opt-in, so players will have to click an in-game popup to get involved. Basically, it’s a voluntary ass-whooping.

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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 was trained with historic game footage that StarCraft-developer Blizzard has been releasing on a monthly basis.

In order to further improve their abilities, the five AIs were pitted against each other in a league. The leading AI racked up experience that would equate to a human training for around 200 years.

Perhaps needless to say, AlphaStar wiped the floor with human players Grzegorz Komincz and Dario Wunsch.

You can watch AlphaStar taking on the human players below:

The only hope for humans so far is that AlphaStar was trained for a single map and using just the one alien race type of three available in the game. Removed from its comfort zone, it would not perform as well.

Video games have driven more rudimentary AI developments for decades. The advancement shown by AlphaStar could be used to create more complex ‘bots’ that can pose a challenge and help train even the best human players.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen DeepMind’s AI bots in action – but, in the past, they’ve had a tendency of immediately rushing its opponents with ‘workers’ in a behaviour that Blizzard called “amusing”.

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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.

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