StarCraft II Has A New Champion! And It Is Not Human

The gaming artificial intelligence AlphaStar which comes from the Google DeepMind laboratories honored its name and became the champion of the legendary RTS game StarCraft 2.

Image by Computerizer from Pixabay

• Be also sure to check out my other posts and follow me @kralizec and subscribe to my Youtube channel at Kralizec Gaming Youtube Channel

Videogames were invented by people for people. But that doesn't necessarily mean that humans will be the best at video games. And the time has come as artificial intelligence is coming to the scene. Developers of DeepMind AIs from Google recently decided that their AI will succeed in the popular real-time strategy game StarCraft II from Blizzard Entertainment.

And this January DeepMind announced that an AI named AlphaStar beat two of the best professional StarCraft players. But soon it showed that it was a bit of an unfair victory. Analysis of the battles showed that AlphaStar won only because of its inhuman speed and micromanagement accuracy.

If you don't know, playing StarCraft is about gathering resources and building an army and base all with the goal of destroying your opponent who is doing the same thing. A real-time strategy game like StarCraft II is particularly hard for an AI. Such an AI must create long-term plans for the several next minutes of the game yet be capable of deciding on the spot how to change them based on the reaction of the enemy. On the other hand, AIs have a big advantage in the fact that they don't do any tiny mistakes in managing their units and are always perfectly focused.

This is why the DeepMind developers changed their AI to play a bit more “human”. Now it plays on the same maps, uses the same interface and has the same rules as the human players. The newest version of the AI watches the same playfield as a human and has a delay in thinking. Nonetheless, AlphaStar managed to achieve the Grandmaster league and get among the top 0.2 percent of the best StarCraft II players. In other words, AlphaStar is better than millions of human players of the game. The success of the AI amazed the developers, gamers, experts and even the public. Not often do you have a prestigious scientific journal like Nature write about computer games?

Honestly, StarCraft was an easy choice for the developers. Once they beat the best chess, go and poker players the complexity of a real-time strategy like StarCraft was the next obvious choice. And all seems to suggest that the reign of humans as the best gamers is ending. But that doesn't mean we should stop playing them. Both gamers and game developers enjoyed the matches between humans and AIs. And AIs may one day become inspiring opponents for the masses.

Sources:

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z

---

• If you like the content I’m producing about science maybe you will like the content I produce about gaming as well! Be sure to check out my other posts!