DeepMind’s StarCraft Bot Has a 191-Year Head Start on Humanity

AlphaStar learned from half a million human games, then played itself 120 million times to master its technique

Credit: Blizzard

DeepMind, Alphabet’s A.I. research firm, has built an artificial intelligence system capable of defeating a vast majority of the world’s StarCraft II players, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The DeepMind team debuted AlphaStar, its StarCraft II-playing bot, earlier this year in show matches against top esports professionals. But the new research details secret matches held this July with players who opted into being randomly matched against the program.

DeepMind deployed three versions of AlphaStar, which each learned the game in a slightly different way. StarCraft II players climb a ladder in the game’s highly competitive multiplayer modes, attaining different ranks depending on their skill level. The first two versions of AlphaStar were good enough to reach the highest tier of play, Grandmaster. After 30 games as each playable race in the game — the insectoid Zerg, advanced alien Protoss, and scrappy human Terran — AlphaStar placed in the top 0.15% of players in the European region.