DeepMind: AI is Heading to StarCraft

Artificial intelligence (AI) in games is often confused with programmed bots (or NPCs). Yes, these bots are "intelligent," so to speak, because they interact with human players, but those interactions are limited by the bots' programming -- they don't behave outside their coding. Conversely, AI applications in games can react to the behavior of human players with their own assessment of the situation -- like in that historic game of Go -- using an algorithm called deep learning. At BlizzCon 2016 on Friday, Google and Blizzard Entertainment announced a partnership to bring Google's deep-learning AI, DeepMind, to StarCraft II. DeepMind will use the real-time strategy game as a testing environment for AI research, using deep reinforcement learning to develop an AI agent that can play StarCraft II effectively.