DeepMind and Blizzard Entertainment will present a StarCraft II live-stream demonstration on Thursday, Jan 24. The London-based Alphabet company known for taking down the world’s top Go master in 2017 tweeted the announcement yesterday.



StarCraft is a classic 1v1 competitive video game series that has been ranked among the top PC games. StarCraft II emerged as a popular AI testing environment when Blizzard entered into partnership with DeepMind in 2016, enabling a variety of machine learning experimentations in the challenging game environment.



DeepMind researchers believe games are an ideal environment for developing and testing AI agents quickly and efficiently: “Testing our agents in games that are not specifically designed for AI research, and where humans play well, is crucial to benchmark agent performance.”



Tweeted DeepMind Research Scientist Oriol Vinyals: “StarCraft II is such an incredible AI research platform and a natural progression from DeepMind’s work on Atari and Go.”



Thursday’s demonstration is scheduled for 18h00 UTC and is expected to draw viewers both from the AI and gaming communities.



The livestream links: