The famous AI researching team Deepmind has partnered with Blizzard to improve artificial intelligence by playing StarCraft II.
The British artificial intelligence research company Deepmind is best known for using games as a way to ‘teach’ its programs and try to understand the human brain. The company made headlines this year when its program AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol – a 9th dan Go player and one of the highest ranked players in the world – 4-1 in a 5 game match. This feat was at first thought to be impossible due to the fact that there is a much larger amount of possible moves in the game Go compared to other games such as Chess.
Deepmind hopes to push its artificial intelligence even further by having it play an arguably more complex game, StarCraft II. Professional players in the StarCraft II scene consistently preform over 200 unique actions a minute to outwit and outperform their opponents. If Deepmind is able to compete at a level such as that, there could be remarkable advances in the field of artificial intelligence and how our brains function.
If you are interested in assisting with the learning of this outstanding program and the team behind it, you simply just have to play multiplayer games of StarCraft II once the partnership becomes complete. We could even see the program attempt to take on the BlizzCon champion in a live game, and that would be a match for the record books.