The world's best gamers may one day compete against the smartest computers Google cut power usage in its data centres by several percentage points earlier this year by trusting artificially intelligent software originally designed to beat 1980s-era Atari video games. And in the years to come, the Internet giant not only could save much more electricity but also solve far larger problems by taking on a much more complex video game. Research scientists at Google's DeepMind unit announced Friday they are developing a computer program that reads data about Blizzard Entertainment's "StarCraft II" games and learns how to play on its own. The software would have to figure out how to split its attention between micromanagement and long-term strategic decisions. It's that manoeuvring that could deliver big breakthroughs.

You might ask why AI "dreams" are necessary given that robots can already dominate humans in most games such as Chess and Go. To grasp this, it is necessary to differentiate between AIs that use supervised vs. unsupervised learning. Most of the impressive feats so far attained by AI have been made using supervised learning, in which organized "training data" is supplied by the programmers and the AI learns to detect patterns within the data. This is a fairly straightforward approach to teaching machines but decidedly not how humans learn. We use an approach more akin to what programmers call unsupervised learning in which the agent experiments on their own to determine how different courses of action affect their goals.

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DeepMind, the British AI firm owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, has signed a new five-year deal to use data collected by the UK's National Health Service. The agreement with the NHS Royal Free Hospital Trust in London replaces a previous deal that attracted controversy over its lack of official oversight. Under the terms of the new deal, DeepMind will handle personally identifiable medical records for some 1.6 million patients, including medical history dating back five years. The agreement also includes stricter data regulation, including "technical audits" of DeepMind's systems. Using data from the Royal Free, DeepMind has built an app named Streams that alerts doctors when patients are in danger of developing acute kidney injury (AKI) -- a common but often overlooked condition.

The announcement at BlizzCon 2016 that met with the most muted response was arguably the most revolutionary. While new content for the likes of Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and Diablo III drew appreciative roars from the Blizzard faithful, the news that Google's DeepMind branch--which is dedicated to developing sophisticated Intelligence--would be teaming up with the makers of Starcraft 2 to further its research on AI elicited more of a murmur. Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm was down to taste. After all, why would the plans of AI scientists be of interest to Starcraft 2 players? As it turns out, if the collaboration between DeepMind and Blizzard is what its developers hope it could be, players will see very tangible benefits--and so will many others outside the video game space.

Google DeepMind Using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to Prevent Sight Loss Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence in applications that could change human lives. DeepMind just announced a medical research project with an NHS Trust to combat sight loss specifically related to Diabetes and Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). As per DeepMind: Diabetes is on the rise. It's estimated that 1 in 11 of the world's adult population are affected. It's also the leading cause of blindness in the working age population – if you're diabetic you are 25 times more likely to suffer some kind of sight loss.

DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence outfit, wants to streamline health care by using machine learning to provide medics with intelligent notifications. But not everyone is happy with the piles of data being shared with the company. The project will provide medics across a number of London hospitals with alerts about patients via an app called Streams. The app is meant to provide easy access to patient histories and test results for nurses and doctors. But its AI will also learn to track patterns in patients' blood test data and flag cases that show early signs of kidney injury to the appropriate doctors.

At BlizzCon earlier this month in Anaheim, California, Blizzard announced an ambitious new project in collaboration with DeepMind, a leading artificial intelligence research company acquired by Google in 2014. After creating the AlphaGo AI that bested the world's top Go player earlier this year, DeepMind's next groundbreaking challenge will be StarCraft II. If DeepMind is able to build an AI that could learn how to beat top players such as Byun "ByuN" Hyun Woo in the complex real-time strategy, tactics and resource management of this game, it would be a giant step forward in AI research. And with DeepMind's interest in using its research to solve hard problems in areas such as healthcare and energy efficiency on a massive scale, this Starcraft II project could impact the whole world. Soon after AlphaGo's Go victory, there were signs that DeepMind would take on StarCraft next. This was not lost on legendary StarCraft player/commentator and former competitive chess player Dan "Artosis" Stemkosi, for whom StarCraft seemed like the logical next step for AI research after games like chess and Go.