The original StarCraft was an early pioneer in eSports, played at the highest level by elite professional players since the late 90s, and remains incredibly competitive to this day.
Today at BlizzCon 2016 in Anaheim, California, we announced our collaboration with Blizzard Entertainment to open up StarCraft II to AI and Machine Learning researchers around the world.įor almost 20 years, the StarCraft game series has been widely recognised as the pinnacle of 1v1 competitive video games, and among the best PC games of all time.
Until now, researchers didn't have access to "StarCraft II." Now, following the recent effective end of "StarCraft II" esports, DeepMind and Blizzard are teaming up to release the game as an AI research environment, with DeepMind taking the lead.ĭeepMind research scientist Oriol Vinyals said it might be some time before the game could beat humans. It helped that Blizzard signed off on attempts by researchers to build AI that could beat the game. It emerged as a target for artificial intelligence researchers because of its layered complexity: players must make high-level strategic decisions while also controlling hundreds of units and making countless quick decisions.
"StarCraft," produced by Blizzard Entertainment, was one of the first major esports games and practically the national sport in South Korea in the 2000s. Its AlphaGo program beat the famously complicated game of go last spring, has long hinted that it might go after the real-time strategy video game series. DeepMind, is an AI company whose mission is to understand intelligence.