Blizzard made a very curious announcement about Starcraft II at BlizzCon 2016. Instead of a new expansion pack, the game is instead being opened up to Google's Deepmind project; and will teach the AI system how to play an RTS. Deepmind made headlines earlier this year when its AlphaGo AI managed to beat a world class Go player; a feat that was believed to be impossible. The number of possible actions in Go was originally thought to be too great for a computer to calculate within the time constraints of a professional match. Despite this, Deepmind pulled off a 4 – 1 victory over Lee Sedol.

DeepMind, the AI research lab in London that was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported £400 million, faces one big problem, according to Professor Yann LeCun, who heads up Facebook's AI research group. Notably, LeCun believes that DeepMind, which employs over 250 people and today sits under Alphabet (Google's parent company), is too far away from California. "The challenge I think that DeepMind has is that it's geographically separated from the mothership in California and that makes it very difficult to build technology that can be used in products," LeCun told Business Insider during an interview in London last week. "So it pushes DeepMind to some extent to try to survive on its own." DeepMind declined to comment on this story but it would likely argue that being based in the UK is not a barrier when it comes to working with product and research teams across Google and the rest of the Alphabet group.

AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence program powered by Google's DeepMind, defeated South Korean world Go champion Lee Sedol convincingly with a 4-1 score earlier in the year. It seems that DeepMind is now moving on to a bigger challenge, going from an ancient board game into a modern strategy video game. At the ongoing BlizzCon 2016, Blizzard and Google announced a collaboration to open up StarCraft II as an AI and machine learning environment for researchers around the world. StarCraft II is one of the most fiercely competitive video games that is played professionally, and according to the DeepMind team, it will provide an interesting testing environment for research in AI as it "provides a useful bridge to the messiness of the real-world." "The skills required for an agent to progress through the environment and play StarCraft well could ultimately transfer to real-world tasks," said Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist for DeepMind who was once the top-ranked player of the game in Spain.

From Chess to Go, board games have been the first frontier of artificial intelligence research for decades. Now, the team at Google's DeepMind wants to take AI to a whole new level in order to beat the online strategy game, StarCraft II. DeepMind announced its decision to partner with StarCraft's creator, Blizzard, at a conference in California. The two groups say that they look forward to programming a computer to react to strategic problems in real time. "DeepMind is on a scientific mission to push the boundaries of AI, developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be told how," wrote DeepMind in a blog post.

The Google logo is displayed at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Blizzard and Google are inviting developers to experiment with artificial intelligence in the game "StarCraft II." According to VentureBeat, Google and Blizzard announced their collaboration at the BlizzCon fan event in Anaheim, California, on Friday, Nov. 4. Google's DeepMind AI division explains the partnership on a blog post that clarifies why "StarCraft II" has been chosen for machine-learning research. Google's blog post states that "StarCraft" provides a useful bridge to the real-world, making an interesting testing environment for current AI research.

Speaking to PCGamesN's dedicated Blizzard reporter Ben Barrett, lead designer for Diablo 3 Kevin Martens said the end-game dungeons would be getting tweaks under the hood for monster behaviour – as well as giving you a bonus roll on legendary gems at the end if you survive without dying to "reward you for doing well instead of punishing you for doing poorly". DeepMind, a world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) research, announced a collaboration with the US video game developer Blizzard Entertainment to open up the real-time strategy game'StarCraft II' to AI and Machine Learning. At this week's BlizzCon convention in California, game developer Blizzard announced that it would release tools to allow third parties to teach artificial intelligences to play the real-time wargame Starcraft II. The tools are being developed in collaboration with Google's DeepMind team, and will use the DeepMind platform. Back in March of this year, Google DeepMind had its AI system, AlphaGo, "sit down" with international Go champion Lee Sedol in a 5-game Go match with a purse of a cool $1 million.

At this week's BlizzCon convention in California, game developer Blizzard announced that it would release tools to allow third parties to teach artificial intelligences to play the real-time wargame Starcraft II. The tools are being developed in collaboration with Google's DeepMind team, and will use the DeepMind platform. In a blog post accompanying the announcement, the DeepMind team said Starcraft "is an interesting testing environment for current AI research because it provides a useful bridge to the messiness of the real world." The game involves interconnected layers of decisions, as players use resources to build infrastructure and assets before engaging in direct combat. StarCraft's complexity when compared to Chess or Go, then, makes it closer to the real-world problems faced by computers which do things like plan logistics networks.

The AI has a long ways to go before it's on a level of competing at a tournament, but right now Vinyals and the crew working on DeepMind have been setting up the parameters and giving the AI the necessary tools to play the game effectively. Since it doesn't use hands or have a physical body, it does everything through simulation, which can create a bit of a conundrum when facing off against humans, given that the AI could technically cheat and access keystrokes and mouse actions in ways that only a computer cold, thus cheating at the game by making millions of calculated moves per minute.

Earlier this year, researchers' artificial intelligence beat a human in the dazzlingly complex board game known as Go. It was a milestone in machine learning. Now, the same Google-backed researchers that designed AlphaGo have their sights set on dominating a new game: Starcraft, the classic computer strategy game that has attracted millions of fans, some of whom duel online in professional tournaments hosted by real-life sports leagues. Researchers from U.K.-based DeepMind want to train a bot that can play StarCraft II in real time -- making decisions about which military units to send on scouting missions, and how to allocate resources and, ultimately, conquer other players. Beginning next year, the game will serve as a research platform for any AI researcher who wants to use it, potentially allowing myriad player-algorithms to train off of the same game.

At BlizzCon on Friday, Google research scientist Oriol Vinyals announced that StarCraft 2 was being opened up to artificial intelligence researchers around the world. The goal: to create better AI opponents for StarCraft 2, and possibly even create AI coaches that could teach humans how to better play the strategy game. Of course, the goal of AI development is not just to match human players but best them, and just as DeepMind's AI program AlphaGo beat human champion Go player Lee Se-dol earlier this year, DeepMind wants its AI to someday take on a human StarCraft 2 champion. There will be more details about DeepMind's interest in StarCraft 2 revealed later during the convention, and we'll update you if we hear anything else.