DeepMind, the Alphabet Inc. owned artificial intelligence company best known for creating software capable of beating the world\u2019s best players at the strategy game Go, has targeted the science fiction video game StarCraft II as its next big research milestone. But so far, space is\u00a0proving a difficult frontier for the company\u2019s algorithms.<\/p>\n
DeepMind\u2019s existing algorithms, including those that performed with super-human skill\u00a0across a host of\u00a0classic Atari titles, \u201ccannot win a single game against the easiest built-in AI,\u201d in StarCraft\u00a0II\u00a0let alone challenge skilled humans, the company said in a blog post Wednesday. The built-in agents, which are created by StarCraft\u00a0publisher Activision Blizzard Inc.,\u00a0use hard-coded rules to determine their game play rather than the kinds of advanced machine learning techniques the London-based DeepMind specializes in.<\/p>\n
The company said new breakthroughs in machine learning would be required for its software agents to master the game.Just how close DeepMind\u00a0may be to such breakthroughs, the blog post didn\u2019t reveal. The algorithm that mastered the Atari games\u00a0was unveiled in June 2016. Since then DeepMind has published a number of research papers that hint it may be closing in on creating software capable of many of the tasks \u2013\u00a0such as prioritizing goals, long-term planning, and memory \u2013\u00a0that any system will need in order to play StarCraft\u00a0II successfully.<\/p>\n
The company said in its blog post that its existing algorithms performed well\u00a0at learning some basic steps \u2013\u00a0such as moving around the game environment and selecting units \u2013\u00a0that will be critical to mastering the game.Games have long served as milestones for computer science research. StarCraft\u00a0is considered an important target for machine learning researchers because, unlike Go, in which both players can see the entire board and take turns moving pieces, players in StarCraft cannot see what is happening in the entire game environment at one time and both players move their units simultaneously.<\/p>\n
The game also requires players to carry out sub-tasks, such as building structures and mining resources, while also conducting reconnaissance, mounting attacks and defending territory. To succeed, a player needs to have a good memory, prioritize among tasks, and plan under conditions of uncertainty.<\/p>\n
Because of these factors, StarCraft\u00a0II comes much closer to approximating many real-world situations than games such as chess, Go or even Poker.\u00a0StarCraft\u00a0II is also used in e-sports competitions, so there are highly-skilled human opponents with which an artificial intelligence can match wits.In order to help computer scientists use StarCraft II\u00a0as a testbed for artificial intelligence, DeepMind\u00a0has partnered with Activision Blizzard, which is based in Santa Monica, California,\u00a0to create an interface that allows outside software to access and play the game. The two companies unveiled that interface, along with a set of tools to help other computer scientists train AI agents to play the game, at a machine learning conference in Australia Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve learned a lot during our collaboration with DeepMind on this project, and we\u2019re very excited to get these tools in your hands to see what amazing things we can create together,\u201d Blizzard wrote in a separate blog post also published Wednesday.Among the tools Activision Blizzard is making public are a dataset of anonymized\u00a0game replays \u2013\u00a0essentially recordings of humans playing the game \u2013\u00a0that computer scientist will be able to use to help train their systems.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne technique that we know allows our agents to learn stronger policies is imitation learning,\u201d DeepMind said in its blog post. \u201cThis kind of training will soon be far easier thanks to Blizzard, which has committed to on-going releases of hundreds of thousands of anonymized replays.\u201dDeepMind also said it was releasing\u00a0a series of \u201cmini-game\u201d environments that will help researchers train their AI agents on basic components of the game.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s\u00a0decision to make its StarCraft II\u00a0toolsets\u00a0available to researchers for free differs from the more proprietary approach the company took when it was first working on algorithms that could master Atari games and Go. It follows efforts by other companies, such as Facebook and Microsoft, to open game environments, including the original StarCraft game and the game Minecraft,\u00a0to the entire AI research community.<\/p>\n
DeepMind has targeted StarCraft II as its next big research milestone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":147813,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[42494,18612],"class_list":["post-223852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-deepmind","tag-starcraft-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223852"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223852"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223854,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223852\/revisions\/223854"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}