Thought you were good at StarCraft? DeepMind's AI bot proves better than 99.8% of fleshy humans

DeepMind's AlphaStar AI bot has reached Grandmaster level at StarCraft II, a popular battle strategy computer game, after ranking within the top 0.15 per cent of players in an online league. StarCraft II is a complex game and has a massive following with its own annual professional tournament - StarCraft II World Championship Series - that involves the best international teams competing over a prize pot over $2m. AlphaStar, however, isn't quite good enough to compete in that competition. Instead it set its eyes on a much smaller contest on Battle.net, the game's official online league hosted by China-friendly gaming biz Blizzard Entertainment. Researchers at Google-stablemate DeepMind entered its bot AlphaStar into a series of blind games, where its opponents had no idea it was playing against a computer.