GG, ROBOT

How a team of AI researchers took on all comers at StarCraft II

Anyone who’s played a single-player videogame recently – and the chances are you have – will appreciate the very special kind of artificial stupidity necessary to make you feel like you’re getting a decent challenge, but that it was your finely honed skills that finally allowed you to triumph rather than pre-programmed flaws in AI strategy.

Putting up a stiff challenge without cheating – no reading the player’s inputs, reacting to the first frame of an attack or psychically knowing where his units are – is a difficult thing to code. But what if you wanted your AI to crush all its enemies and see them driven before it? Perhaps becoming good enough at a game to be in the top 98 per cent of players? All without cheating? That would be even more difficult.

A team from Google has done it, however. The AlphaStar AI from DeepMind triumphed over puny humans in a series of blind games (the meatbags had no idea they were playing against an AI) of StarCraft II on Battle.net. It did rather well, achieving Grandmaster level and out-performing 99.8 per cent of players on European servers.

StarCraft II has emerged by consensus as the next big challenge for AI now that it’s mastered chess, go, and Jeopardy. While IBM’s latest supercomputer takes on the Cambridge Union in a debate, the DeepMind team chose videogames, something perhaps unsurprising since its CEO is one Demis Hassabis, who readers with long memories might recall. Having contributed some level design to Bullfrog’s Syndicate (1993), Hassabis became co-designer and lead programmer on 1994’s Theme Park, which went on to sell ten million copies. He was 17 at the time.