DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too

"They can adapt to teammates with arbitrary skills," said Wojciech Czarnecki, a researcher with DeepMind, a lab owned by the same parent company as Google. Through thousands of hours of game play, the agents learned very particular skills, like racing toward the opponent's home base when a teammate was on the verge of capturing a flag. As human players know, the moment the opposing flag is brought to one's home base, a new flag appears at the opposing base, ripe for the taking. DeepMind's project is part of a broad effort to build artificial intelligence that can play enormously complex, three-dimensional video games, including Quake III, Dota 2 and StarCraft II. Many researchers believe that success in the virtual arena will eventually lead to automated systems with improved abilities in the real world.