DeepMind Beats Pros at StarCraft in Another Triumph for Bots

In London last month, a team from Alphabet's UK-based artificial intelligence research unit DeepMind quietly laid a new marker in the contest between humans and computers. Thursday, it revealed the achievement, in a three-hour YouTube stream in which aliens and robots fought to the death. DeepMind's broadcast showed its artificial intelligence bot, AlphaStar, defeating a professional player at the complex real-time-strategy videogame StarCraft II. The machine-learning-powered software appeared to have discovered strategies unknown to the pros who compete for millions of dollars in prizes offered each year in one of e-sports' most lucrative games. "It was different from any StarCraft that I have played, Komincz, known professionally as MaNa, said Thursday.