Blizzard and Deepmind want to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence. And slowly, the project is gaining momentum!
A while ago, there was a rather strange announcement at BlizzCon. Instead of a new game presentation, a scientist took the stage and announced that Blizzard is now working with researchers on a new artificial intelligence. The foundation is the strategy game StarCraft II, and the hope is to build the AI in such a way that it can learn to perform complex actions over time.
The goal of Project Deepmind is to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and develop systems that can solve complex problems.
To achieve this, the first tools have now been released to test the artificial intelligences. These include interfaces to test the AIs in StarCraft II and a lot of replay material from professional players – over 500,000 matches have been recorded to have enough research material.
AIs still lose against the simplest difficulty in StarCraft II
However, this research is still in its infancy. On the official Deepmind site, they report on the first successes and failures of the project. Some AIs were already helplessly overwhelmed trying to command the building units in the game to gather resources. However, over time, the program learned more and eventually even managed to create bases. However, this was not enough to compete even against the easiest difficulty level of Blizzard’s own StarCraft II AI.
But they are learning – and the AIs are learning together with the scientists.
This likely means it is only a matter of time before the AI learns that the easiest way to win is to hack and shut down the opponent’s PC. Or maybe steal power from their refrigerator … Perhaps we are just a bit paranoid.
