Google DeepMind's next gaming challenge: can AI beat Starcraft II?

DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence company that's now a part of Google, stunned the world back in March when its AlphaGo AI defeated world-champion Go player Lee Se-dol to achieve one of the most sought-after feats in computer science. The ancient Chinese board game of Go was considered the most difficult "perfect information" game for computers to crack, as the dizzying complexity produced by its simple rules requires a highly advanced degree of intuition to play at a serious level, but AlphaGo managed it with a revolutionary system built on neural networks and machine learning.

Now DeepMind is turning its attention to a game that will pose an even bigger challenge: StarCraft II. Blizzard Entertainment's real-time strategy hit is one of the most fiercely competitive games played professionally around the world, and the company is working together with DeepMind to release it as an AI research environment. The announcement is being made at Blizzard’s annual conference, BlizzCon.

"StarCraft is an interesting testing environment for current AI research because it provides a useful bridge to the messiness of the real-world," says Oriol Vinyals, a DeepMind research scientist who was once the top-ranked StarCraft player in Spain. "The skills required for an agent to progress through the environment and play StarCraft well could ultimately transfer to real-world tasks." Creating strong StarCraft AIs would obviously also have major implications for the game itself, with the potential for customized virtual coaches to raise the level of play across the board.