DeepMind Technologies, the Google-owned UK company behind the AlphaGo
and AlphaZero AI self-learning game-playing programs, has gone on to
create AlphaStar, which has taught itself to play a video game
called "StarCraft II" so well, that it has trounced a succession of
champion players.
Willie D. Jones writes about it at IEEE Spectrum.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Willie D. Jones, IEEE Spectrum
To win at StarCraft II, a player builds an empire with all forethought and flexibility such an endeavor requires. Players must weigh the importance of competing objectives—like gathering resources, building structures, organizing an army, setting up defenses, and fighting battles—and shift their relative importance in real time over the course of a game that could last an hour or more.
Further, only a portion of the landscape in the game’s fictional world is visible at any given time, so the odds of winning are greatly affected by the player’s memory and ability to set up things that won’t be continuously monitored. Further ratcheting up the game’s complexity is the fact that one of more than 300 possible actions can be taken at any given time (compared with the fewer than a dozen moves a player can make in, say, simple arcade games).
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Willie D. Jones, IEEE Spectrum
In fact, up until now, StarCraft II and its predecessor were too complex for AI gamers to take on. Even when the game was dumbed down by simplifying maps of the landscape and changing the rules to give the agents superhuman abilities, the AI agents were easily bested by human professional gamers. But AlphaStar needs no such assistance. Its deep neural network, trained directly from raw game data via supervised and reinforcement learning techniques, more than holds its own.
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The real moral of the story is probably that if you were a young male
who was useless at everything except playing video games, with the
emergence of DeepMind Technologies self-learning algorithms, you are
now officially useless at everything.
AlphaStar press release and video :-
https://deepmind.com/blog/alphastar-...-starcraft-ii/
IEEE Spectrum article "DeepMind’s AI Shows Itself to Be a
World-Beating World Builder" :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/...-world-builder
AlphaGo documentary movie trailer :-
https://youtu.be/8tq1C8spV_g