After beating IBM's Deep Blue computer in a six-game chess match in 1996, Garry Kasparov played a rematch a year later that we called the "Slaughter on 7th Avenue". Catastrophe overtook the best chess mind of his era after Deep Blue played chess like no human. Prior to the game Garry Kasparov told New Scientist that Go's clock was ticking, but the scale of the defeat nevertheless came as a shock, not least to Sedol. The next frontier for AI in games is Starcraft 2, a space-war strategy game played in real time.

Expectations for a match-up between a professional StarCraft player and sophisticated AI ratcheted up last year after an AI program beat a highly ranked human player at Go, one of the world's most difficult board games. Dave Churchill, an assistant professor of computer science at Memorial University of Newfoundland, who has run the AIIDE competition for the past six years, says the contest's AI bots generally play at a "low amateur" level and have never won against a proficient human player. Last November, DeepMind announced it would collaborate with StarCraft publisher Blizzard to create a free, open-source API tool to enable researchers to test AI algorithms in StarCraft II. Around the same time, Facebook's AI Research group described a reinforcement-learning algorithm it made for StarCraft and released its own free, open-source tools to help AI researchers link deep-learning algorithms to an early version of the game.

This article reviews the last two IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) StarCraft Artificial Intelligence (AI) Competitions organized by the authors; these were the fourth and fifth in a series of annual competitions initiated in 2011. StarCraft AI Competitions have been hosted in conjunction with three different events: the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), CIG, and Student StarCraft AI Tournament (SSCAIT). The purpose of these competitions is to design bots that are able to autonomously and successfully play the StarCraft game by implementing real-time strategies. Recent results reveal the promising use of AI techniques in creating successful AI entries, but there is room for improvement with respect to the bots' ability to adapt and learn to defeat humans and scripted AI bots.