Engineers at Waymo, owned by Alphabet, teamed up with researchers at DeepMind, another Alphabet division dedicated to AI, to find a more efficient process to train and fine-tune the company's self-driving algorithms.

Engineers at Waymo, owned by Alphabet, teamed up with researchers at DeepMind, another Alphabet division dedicated to AI, to find a more efficient process to train and fine-tune the company's self-driving algorithms.

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.