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shrewdsheep writes:

In a new attempt to dethrone humans in game-play, DeepMind takes on Starcraft II. The results are published in Nature.

DeepMind today announced a new milestone for its artificial intelligence agents trained to play the Blizzard Entertainment game StarCraft II. The Google-owned AI lab’s more sophisticated software, still called AlphaStar, is now grandmaster level in the real-time strategy game, capable of besting 99.8 percent of all human players in competition. The findings are to be published in a research paper in the scientific journal Nature.

Not only that, but DeepMind says it also evened the playing field when testing the new and improved AlphaStar against human opponents who opted into online competitions this past summer. For one, it trained AlphaStar to use all three of the game’s playable races, adding to the complexity of the game at the upper echelons of pro play. It also limited AlphaStar to only viewing the portion of the map a human would see and restricted the number of mouse clicks it could register to 22 non-duplicated actions every five seconds of play, to align it with standard human movement.

Still, the AI was capable of achieving grandmaster level, the highest possible online competitive ranking, and marks the first ever system to do so in StarCraft II. DeepMind sees the advancement as more proof that general-purpose reinforcement learning, which is the machine learning technique underpinning the training of AlphaStar, may one day be used to train self-learning robots, self-driving cars, and create more advanced image and object recognition systems.

“The history of progress in artificial intelligence has been marked by milestone achievements in games. Ever since computers cracked Go, chess and poker, StarCraft has emerged by consensus as the next grand challenge,” said David Silver, a DeepMind principle research scientist on the AlphaStar team, in a statement. “The game’s complexity is much greater than chess, because players control hundreds of units; more complex than Go, because there are 10^26 possible choices for every move; and players have less information about their opponents than in poker.”

Back in January, DeepMind announced that its AlphaStar system was able to best top pro players 10 matches in a row during a prerecorded session, but it lost to pro player Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz in a final match streamed live online. The company kept improving the system between January and June, when it said it would start accepting invites to play the best human players from around the world. The ensuing matches took place in July and August, DeepMind says.

The results were stunning: AlphaStar had become among the most sophisticated Starcraft II players on the planet, but remarkably still not quite superhuman. There are roughly 0.2 percent of players capable of defeating it, but it is largely considered only a matter of time before the system improves enough to crush any human opponent.

Watch the video: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03343-4

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