The collection of engineers and scientists at DeepMind have pushed artificial intelligence research over the edge of expectation. As a matter of fact, they have created programs that train their AI using games and one of those programs was able to learn and beat 49 Atari games. Recently, the group introduced a brand new set of tools that will speed up AI research in StarCraft II.

There are so many complex layers when it comes to teaching artificial intelligence to play strategy games. StarCraft itself is hard considering the hundreds of basic actions that create millions of possible outcomes it would have to account for. Balancing the long term goals with other sub-goals is a challenge in itself as well. The difficulty of these challenges is what they aim to overcome and why, according to their website, DeepMind has decided StarCraft II is the best place to advance their AI technology.

Testing our agents in games that are not specifically designed for AI research, and where humans play well, is crucial to benchmark agent performance. That is why we, along with our partner Blizzard Entertainment, are excited to announce the release of SC2LE, a set of tools that we hope will accelerate AI research in the real-time strategy game StarCraft II.”

The first StarCraft served as a wonderful testing ground for AI researchers in the past and with these new tools from DeepMind, it is hoped that they will help expand the AI technology even further. The SC2LE (StarCraft II Learning Environment) was made with input from Blizzard and included are a growing dataset of game replays, a machine learning API, a different open source version of the DeepMind toolset, mini games that test the AI agent’s performance at different tasks, and much more.

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