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Last year, Alphabet's DeepMind division captured the world's attention by besting humanity's top player in the game of Go. The achievement, which many experts predicted was still a decade off, showed the rapid progress being made in the world of artificial intelligence. DeepMind subsequently announced that its next goal in gaming was mastering StarCraft, a classic PC game that is a staple of competitive e-sports. Facebook also threw its hat in the ring, creating an open-source framework so that developers could work on solving StarCraft using the social network's AI toolkit. Now a team from China's Alibaba has published a paper describing a system that learned to execute a number of strategies employed by high-level players without being given any specific instruction on how best to manage combat.