DeepMind is Teaching AIs How to Manage Real-World Tasks Through Gaming

Last year, Google's DeepMind announced a partnership with Blizzard Entertainment to develop and test artificial intelligence (AI) agents in the popular real-time strategy game StarCraft II. Now, DeepMind has released a series of tools they're calling StarCraft II Learning Environment (SC2LE) to test their agents against human competitors, as well as enable researchers to develop their own agents for the game. "Testing our agents in games that are not specifically designed for AI research, and where humans play well, is crucial to benchmark agent performance," DeepMind's team wrote in a blog post. The large pool of online StarCraft II players will provide a huge variety of "extremely talented opponents" from which the AI can learn. Details of DeepMind's research were published in a paper alongside the released toolset, which includes a machine learning API; a dataset of game replays; an open source version of PySC2, the Python component SC2LE; and more.