AI becomes grandmaster in 'fiendishly complex' StarCraft II

An artificial intelligence (AI) system has reached the highest rank of StarCraft II, the fiendishly complex and wildly popular computer game, in a landmark achievement for the field. DeepMind's AlphaStar outperformed 99.8% of registered human players to attain grandmaster level at the game, which sees opponents build civilisations and battle their inventive, warmongering alien neighbours. The AI system mastered the game after 44 days of training, which involved learning from recordings of the best human players and then going up against itself and versions of the programme that intentionally tested its weaknesses. "AlphaStar has become the first AI system to reach the top tier of human performance in any professionally played e-sport on the full unrestricted game under professionally approved conditions," said David Silver, a researcher at DeepMind. More than $31m in prize money has been handed out from thousands of StarCraft II e-sport tournaments since the game was released in 2010. Players start with a small number of worker units that can gather resources, construct buildings, develop new units and technologies, and embark on scouting missions to gain intelligence on opponents.