The Google-owned DeepMind AI program AlphaStar is now better at StarCraft 2 than a mind-blowing 99.8 percent of the game's human players, making the artificial intelligence Grandmaster level and one of the best StarCraft 2 players in the entire world. DeepMind has famously supplanted the best players in other endeavors as its most sophisticated software, AlphaStar, increasingly becomes more complex and is improved by its creators.
AlphaStar was previously tested against human StarCraft 2 players this past January, when DeepMind announced that the AI was able to beat professional StarCraft 2 players ten matches in a row during prerecorded sessions. In the final match that was livestreamed, however, Grzegorz "MaNa" Komnicz was able to defeat the AI and the StarCraft 2 pro scene breathed a collective sigh of relief. The company has been continuing to tinker with the AlphaStar AI since that time, improving the system over a six month span before the AI was run against some of the best human players in the world over the course of July and August.
The results for AlphaStar are, quite frankly, frightening - the AI can now defeat 99.8 percent of all StarCraft 2 players according to a report from The Verge, ranking it amongst the best on the planet. With that said, the 0.2 percent of players that can still beat it are likely most of the game's top stars, which means AlphaStar still has a way to go before it can start claiming victories over the likes of Serral and Maru. Even more encouragingly, AlphaStar has been bringing new strategies to pros who are put on the back foot often by the fact that the AI is approaching StarCraft 2 from a level that others haven't. Given that the AI is capable of playing all of StarCraft 2's three races, it could be the progenitor of some top-level strategy in the near future.
AlphaStar is the first system that has ever achieved Grandmaster level in StarCraft 2, an impressive feat given that the game is more complex than Go or chess. Games with dynamic levels of variable and less visible information have historically been the Achilles heel of AI programs in the past, but it seems AlphaStar is finally beginning to circumvent those roadblocks on the way to becoming one of the world's best StarCraft 2 players.
It's another example of how AI is being used to push esports forward. Dota 2 has had a similar experience, and the showmatches between AI and players are often extremely fun and exciting. Once AlphaStar is done with the world of StarCraft 2, perhaps it will set its sights on even bigger game: the world's most complex game, Magic: The Gathering.
Source: The Verge