Google's DeepMind turns to StarCraft II after conquering Go

Google's DeepMind has announced that it will be making use of game development studio Blizzard's StarCraft II game as a testing platform for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning research, opening the environment worldwide. The announcement, made during Blizzard's BlizzCon conference at Anahaim on Sunday, has seen both companies build an open research environment to be used by anyone across the globe as of 2017, as well as by DeepMind itself. "We've worked closely with the StarCraft II team to develop an API that supports something similar to previous bots written with a'scripted' interface, allowing programmatic control of individual units and access to the full game state (with some new options as well)," DeepMind said. "Ultimately, agents will play directly from pixels, so to get us there, we've developed a new image-based interface that outputs a simplified low-resolution RGB image data for map and minimap, and the option to break out features into separate'layers', like terrain heightfield, unit type, unit health, etc." The two are also working on creating "curriculum scenarios" -- a ladder of increasingly complex tasks so that AI researchers of any level can get their system running, benchmark algorithms, and advance.