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The announcement at BlizzCon 2016 that met with the most muted response was arguably the most revolutionary.
While new content for the likes of Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and Diablo III drew appreciative roars from the Blizzard faithful, the news that Google’s DeepMind branch—which is dedicated to developing sophisticated Intelligence—would be teaming up with the makers of Starcraft 2 to further its research on AI elicited more of a murmur.
Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm was down to taste. After all, why would the plans of AI scientists be of interest to Starcraft 2 players? As it turns out, if the collaboration between DeepMind and Blizzard is what its developers hope it could be, players will see very tangible benefits—and so will many others outside the video game space.
AI has been an integral part of video games for quite some time now, and as Starcraft 2’s executive producer Chris Sigaty points out, the AI that DeepMind hopes to develop won’t be the first to play the Blizzard RTS. Currently the games uses a scripted AI. It's created by a team of designers and engineers that have an understanding of the way the game plays, with their expertise placed into a script and fed a list of conditions. For example, if X amount of resources is collected, the AI should spend the value of Y on Z units.
"They’re elaborate and interesting to play against; there’s some random choice and specific choices that happen," says Sigaty. "They can expand on their terrain, gather resources—basically do the things you need to do in Starcraft 2. But these [AI] are scripted. They’re predictable and ultimately, unless it cheats, there’s not an AI out there who can beat a human."
This holds true for Starcraft 2—the best e-sports players routinely beat AI opponents. The aim DeepMind is to develop an AI that plays the game the same way as a human, potentially one that can beat the best players, which widens the potential for deep learning. And the DeepMind team has already had some success in the gaming field: in March this year, the team’s AI AlphaGo saw off the world-class Go player Lee Sedol in a best-of-five series that it won 4-1—leaping what was a major hurdle for AIs in the past.
arstechnica.com
This is a followup to this news article.
While new content for the likes of Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and Diablo III drew appreciative roars from the Blizzard faithful, the news that Google’s DeepMind branch—which is dedicated to developing sophisticated Intelligence—would be teaming up with the makers of Starcraft 2 to further its research on AI elicited more of a murmur.
Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm was down to taste. After all, why would the plans of AI scientists be of interest to Starcraft 2 players? As it turns out, if the collaboration between DeepMind and Blizzard is what its developers hope it could be, players will see very tangible benefits—and so will many others outside the video game space.
AI has been an integral part of video games for quite some time now, and as Starcraft 2’s executive producer Chris Sigaty points out, the AI that DeepMind hopes to develop won’t be the first to play the Blizzard RTS. Currently the games uses a scripted AI. It's created by a team of designers and engineers that have an understanding of the way the game plays, with their expertise placed into a script and fed a list of conditions. For example, if X amount of resources is collected, the AI should spend the value of Y on Z units.
"They’re elaborate and interesting to play against; there’s some random choice and specific choices that happen," says Sigaty. "They can expand on their terrain, gather resources—basically do the things you need to do in Starcraft 2. But these [AI] are scripted. They’re predictable and ultimately, unless it cheats, there’s not an AI out there who can beat a human."
This holds true for Starcraft 2—the best e-sports players routinely beat AI opponents. The aim DeepMind is to develop an AI that plays the game the same way as a human, potentially one that can beat the best players, which widens the potential for deep learning. And the DeepMind team has already had some success in the gaming field: in March this year, the team’s AI AlphaGo saw off the world-class Go player Lee Sedol in a best-of-five series that it won 4-1—leaping what was a major hurdle for AIs in the past.
Google DeepMind could invent the next generation of AI by playing Starcraft 2
How Google’s AI research team has teamed up with Blizzard to further deep learning in AI.
This is a followup to this news article.
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