DeepMind, an offshoot of Google's parent company, debuted a computer program in January capable of beating professional players at one of the world's toughest video games. StarCraft is a military science fiction franchise set in a universe rife with conflict, where armies of opponents face off to become the most powerful. And DeepMind's program, called AlphaStar, reached StarCraft II's highest rank — Grandmaster. It can defeat 99.8 percent of human players, according to a study published in the journal Nature in October.
StarCraft is one of the most popular, difficult electronic sports in the world. And that status has spurred a smattering of code-writers to use it as a training ground for artificial intelligence. It's not just corporate research groups like DeepMind putting StarCraft to the test, either. Amateur gamers and academics have also taken on the challenge of attempting to beat human StarCraft players with autonomous bots.
But why StarCraft? On its face, the video game has the standard hallmarks of its fantasy counterparts: strife in a post-apocalyptic world, a race to make yourself the most powerful opponent and a battle to defeat your enemies. But instead of controlling a single first-person shooter agent, as in games like Halo or Overwatch, players manage a whole economy of builders, fighters and defense systems that work symbiotically to keep them from losing.
Although fantastical in nature, StarCraft's multi-faceted world creates complexities that mirror our own. And using the game as an incubator to train computers could help researchers build better bots with real-world effects.
