Having notched impressive victories over human professionals in Go, Atari Games, and most recently StarCraft 2 -- Google's DeepMind team has now turned its formidable research efforts to soccer. In a paper released last week, the UK AI company demonstrates a novel machine learning method that trains a team of AI agents to play a simulated version of "the beautiful game." Gaming, AI and soccer fans hailed DeepMind's latest innovation on social media, with comments like "You should partner with EA Sports for a FIFA environment!" Machine learning, and particularly deep reinforcement learning, has in recent years achieved remarkable success across a wide range of competitive games. Collaborative-multi-agent games however remained a relatively difficult research domain.

Analysis The ability to think logically and to reason is key to intelligence. When this can be replicated in machines, it will no doubt make AI smarter. But it's a difficult problem, and current methods used in deep learning aren't advanced enough. Deep learning is good for processing information, but it can struggle with reasoning. Enter a different player to the game: relational networks, or RNs.

AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence program powered by Google's DeepMind, defeated South Korean world Go champion Lee Sedol convincingly with a 4-1 score earlier in the year. It seems that DeepMind is now moving on to a bigger challenge, going from an ancient board game into a modern strategy video game. At the ongoing BlizzCon 2016, Blizzard and Google announced a collaboration to open up StarCraft II as an AI and machine learning environment for researchers around the world. StarCraft II is one of the most fiercely competitive video games that is played professionally, and according to the DeepMind team, it will provide an interesting testing environment for research in AI as it "provides a useful bridge to the messiness of the real-world." "The skills required for an agent to progress through the environment and play StarCraft well could ultimately transfer to real-world tasks," said Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist for DeepMind who was once the top-ranked player of the game in Spain.