AI is set to beat you at your own game Ina Fassbender/Reuters/Alamy

Artificial intelligence has a new target in its cross hairs for 2017: StarCraft, a real-time war strategy game series. Like other gamers before them, StarCraft fans may soon be forced to bow down to their machine overlords, as some of the biggest AI research groups set out to beat the best human players.

Demis Hassabis, cofounder of Google-owned firm DeepMind, and Jeff Dean, who leads the Google Brain project, have both hinted that StarCraft will be their next target, while Facebook researchers have just released an open-source platform designed to help people develop AI to play the game.

Succeeding in StarCraft would be a show of strategic strength. AI’s gaming prowess reached new heights in March when DeepMind’s AlphaGo system defeated one of the world’s best Go players, Lee Sedol. The AI’s ability to win at Go was particularly impressive owing to the complexity of the ancient Chinese game. There are more possible moves in Go than there are atoms in the universe, so AlphaGo couldn’t work out its strategy simply by “solving” the game. Instead, its neural networks were trained using a database of 30 million moves made by expert human players. The software could then evaluate how each potential move in a real-life game would alter its overall chance of victory, allowing it to choose the best one.


But winning at StarCraft is a different challenge. These popular video games involve building huge armies to battle against each other over a large virtual terrain. Players can’t see exactly what their opponents are up to, so they have to make decisions based on incomplete information – just like in the real world. Mastering the chaos in StarCraft will therefore have implications beyond video games: it should improve AI’s ability to deal with reality.

Software teams have been battling StarCraft-playing AIs against each other for years in the AIIDE StarCraft AI Competition, but when pitted against humans, the best flesh-and-blood players still have the edge. That could change in 2017.

“Mastering the chaos of StarCraft should help AIs deal with reality”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Gamers in AI’s cross hairs”