Overall, it feels very fair – like it is playing a 'real' game of StarCraft.'īut of course it's not just about StarCraft 2: AlphaStar's ascendance represents a significant step forward in AI research that could have repercussions that go far beyond videogames. StarCraft 2 pro Dario 'TLO' Wünsch, who's been working on the project, said AlphaStar's gameplay is 'incredibly impressive,' but not 'superhuman-certainly not on a level that a human couldn’t theoretically achieve. I will admit that most of the technical verbiage goes way over my head-the first thing I think about when I see the word 'agent' is a guy talking into his shoe-but the net result of all this expended brainpower is a kickass StarCraft 2 player. AlphaStar was rated at Grandmaster level for all three StarCraft races and above 99.8 percent of officially ranked human players.'

We evaluated our agent, AlphaStar, in the full game of StarCraft 2, through a series of online games against human players. We chose to address the challenge of StarCraft using general-purpose learning methods that are in principle applicable to other complex domains: a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that uses data from both human and agent games within a diverse league of continually adapting strategies and counter-strategies, each represented by deep neural networks. Despite these advantages, no previous agent has come close to matching the overall skill of top StarCraft players. 'Over the course of a decade and numerous competitions, the strongest agents have simplified important aspects of the game, utilized superhuman capabilities, or employed hand-crafted sub-systems. As a stepping stone to this goal, the domain of StarCraft has emerged as an important challenge for artificial intelligence research, owing to its iconic and enduring status among the most difficult professional esports and its relevance to the real world in terms of its raw complexity and multi-agent challenges,' the Nature research abstract explains. 'Many real-world applications require artificial agents to compete and coordinate with other agents in complex environments.

Starcraft 2 real scale