If you've grown up playing StarCraft, you'd remember how terrible the A.I. is back in the 90's, with their units hilariously walking in a straight line and not knowing what to do after the first two waves of attack; or retreating their entire army back to their base in StarCraft II if one of their workers is harassed, despite the improved A.I.. Well, that could be all changed in the future, now that Google Deepmind has announced their collaboration with Blizzard Entertainment to incorporate A.I. and Machine Learning in StarCraft II with researchers around the world.
To refresh your memory, Google Deepmind is an artificial intelligence designed by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman in London during the year 2010, to solve complex problem by itself and use it to make the world a better place. And just a few months ago, Google Deepmind's AlphaGo defeated the world's best Go player, Lee Sedol by a 4-1 score, oh boy...Terminator-vibe much?
It only seems natural for Google Deepmind to move on to this next phase, after all, StarCraft (along with Counter-Strike) is the pioneer of competitive eSports thanks to the South Korean pro-gamers, that requires swift strategies and tactics to win in real-time with barely any breathing room, from managing resources efficiently to controlling your army's position at the same time; this is probably why the Deepmind team picked StarCraft because they see the game as a potential testing environment for their current A.I. research,
Both parties are now working closely "to develop an API that supports something similar to previous bots written with a 'scripted' interface," according to Deepmind team, this is "allowing programmatic control of individual units and access to the full game state (with some new options as well). Ultimately agents will play directly from pixels, so to get us there, we’ve developed a new image-based interface that outputs a simplified low resolution RGB image data for map & minimap, and the option to break out features into separate “layers”, like terrain heightfield, unit type, unit health etc."
In addition, some "curriculum" exercises will be created by Blizzard to allow you (yes, you) to challenge the agent in various tasks and benchmark different algorithms and advances. Furthermore, researchers around the world have the freedom to control and create their own tasks with the help of StarCraft II Galaxy editor tool.
We are quite intrigued on where will this bring Deepmind to, in the name of science, this is an exciting time to be alive to see the progress of next level A.I. in gaming, but let's just hope they won't overtake our world and start launching nukes (#touchwood).
If you're interested to participate the research, visit this link to check it out and stay tuned for more news at Technave.com.
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