Google and Blizzard invite you to train AI with 'StarCraft II'

Google, apparently tired of trouncing human players at Go with its DeepMind AI, set its computer intelligence up with Blizzard's video game Starcraft II last fall. It seems that was more than a stunt: Today, Google announced it has built a whole research environment around training its AI to play the space-age strategy game -- and it's publicly available. Anyone who wants can tinker with DeepMind's new toolset, SC2LE, to facilitate their own AI research. The bundle includes a pair of kits up on GitHub: first, Blizzard's machine learning API, which has Linux tools for the first time, and then an open source version of the DeepMind toolset called PySC2. Blizzard also provided some extra goodies, like a dataset of anonymized 1v1 game replays for programmers to parse through, along with sample code and some sample bots.