Google's StarCraft-playing AI is crushing pro gamers

In December, AlphaStar played as a Protoss and won five games against Dario Wünsch, a German player who goes by the gamer handle TLO and who also played as a Protoss (although it is not the group in which he specializes). A week later, the AI won five games again, this time against a tougher Protoss competitor: Grzegorz Komincz, a professional gamer from Poland who goes by the name MaNa. DeepMind announced the victories Thursday during a live stream on YouTube and Twitch. The researchers used a sort of tournament-style approach to train AlphaStar. First, they spent three days training a neural network -- a machine-learning algorithm modeled after the way neurons work in a brain -- on replays of human players' StarCraft II games. This neural network was used to create a number of computer-based competitors that played many, many rounds of the game against each other, learning from their experiences, over the course of two weeks.