StarCraft: Artificial intelligence can not deal with humans ... for now

First it was chess and later theoretically much more intuitive games like poker or Go: the artificial intelligence engines have been surpassing humans in more and more areas, and now the new challenge of these developments is to be unbeatable in the well-known strategy game StarCraft.

Facebook has been researching this specific area for some time, and AlphaGo developers have already declared that their next challenge is to launch an artificial intelligence engine that surpasses any human player to StarCraft, but in that war the first battle has fallen side of humans: a professional player has beaten 4-0 AI engines that put him in front.

Playing blind adds extra complexity

StarCraft professional player "Stork" Byung-gu faced four of those artificial intelligence engines in a competition that took place at Sejong University in South Korea. This institution has been organizing StarCraft tournaments in which AI engines competed since 2010, but this was the first time that these engines faced a professional player.

Lee Sedol was defeated by AlphaGo, the development of DeepMind, only a few months ago, when many experts estimated that a machine could not beat the best Go players in the world for five years.

Unlike chess or Go in which players see the board at all times and can establish their strategy based on that information, in StarCraft such strategies are based much more on their memory and much more limited information since they do not You can see the entire game map.

That added difficulty seems to be too much for the bots involved in the competition, one of which was the famous "Cherry Pi" developed by Facebook artificial intelligence labs. Song Byung-gu crushed those four engines in one breath: the one that lasted most lasted 10 minutes and a half, and in 27 minutes it was all over for those artificial intelligence engines.

It is especially striking to note that this victory occurred even when the artificial intelligence engines have a much greater calculation capacity and can make moves in the game faster. In fact one of the bots, developed in Norway, was capable of completing 19,000 actions per minute; The fastest of the StarCraft players can barely complete a few hundred actions per minute.

After the games, Song declared that the way the machines played was suicidal, since professional players "only start a team when we have an opportunity to win with our army and the ability to control those units". Still, he admitted to being surprised by some of the moments when those engines defended themselves from their attacks.

It seems that at the moment StarCraft is therefore a domain of human beings, but new efforts like the aforementioned development of DeepMind (company responsible for AlphaGo) could embarrass professional human players sooner rather than later. The surprise was already seen with the game of Go, which many experts indicated that would continue to be dominated by humans for another five years.