DeepMind's StarCraft Bot Has a 191-Year Head Start on Humanity

DeepMind, Alphabet's A.I. research firm, has built an artificial intelligence system capable of defeating a vast majority of the world's StarCraft II players, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The DeepMind team debuted AlphaStar, its StarCraft II-playing bot, earlier this year in show matches against top esports professionals. But the new research details secret matches held this July with players who opted into being randomly matched against the program. DeepMind deployed three versions of AlphaStar, which each learned the game in a slightly different way. The first two versions of AlphaStar were good enough to reach the highest tier of play, Grandmaster.