AlphaStar, DeepMind’s StarCraft II playing AI, has achieved Grandmaster level in StarCraft II and is now ranked higher than 99.8% of the active StarCraft II player base.
StarCraft II Logo – pngimg
StarCraft II is one of eSports most beloved games. The strategy game features fast-paced real-time strategy and battle between players who take command of one of three fictional in-game races.
However, players faced a new opponent this summer – AlphaStar, Google AI firm DeepMind’s foray into the world of eSports.
StarCraft II‘ s Extraordinary Complexity
StarCraft II was chosen for its incredible complexity. StarCraft players control hundreds of soldiers, vehicles, and warships simultaneously and in real-time. Furthermore, unlike common board games like chess and go, StarCraft II players cannot see what the opponent is doing unless the player physically sends a unit to gather information. This meant that AlphaStar had to choose the best of the 1026 possible actions that it can make based on the information that it had gathered.
Gameplay of StarCraft II – Vicente Alfonso, Flickr
AlphaStar’s Journey and Its Next Steps
AlphaStar used a fully-automated system to learn how to play StarCraft II. It used many general-purpose learning techniques, such as self-play and imitation learning, where the AI plays against itself and imitates others respectively, to teach itself.
Depiction of some learning methods and challenges involved – DeepMind
AlphaStar was first pitted against two professional level players in December of last year, however many felt as though it wasn’t a fair fight. Therefore, DeepMind adjusted and limited AlphaStar’s reflex speed to even up the playing-field before unleashing AlphaStar onto the European StarCraft II servers in July.
In order to keep the experiment blind, DeepMind used a myriad of techniques, such as playing on multiple different accounts and constantly changing between these accounts.
Although AlphaStar wasn’t able to beat all opponents it met, many of which were some of the best in the world, it was still able to achieve a very high ranking and can be considered a huge step in progress for artificial intelligence.
Although DeepMind considers AlphaStar a success, StarCraft II is far from being beaten. AlphaStar does not quite play at the world champion level and you should expect to see more from AlphaStar and other artificial intelligence in the future.
Written by Tim Chan
