Trusted Reviews is supported by its audience. If you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a commission. Learn more.

DeepMind is close to mastering StarCraft II

Not content with being the best in the world at the ancient Chinese game of Go, Google’s DeepMind AI has picked up something a little more recent: 2010’s Starcraft 2. 

In a new blog post, researchers has given an update on how AlphaStar – the name given to the DeepMind’s Starcraft playing AI – is getting on. The long and short of it is very well: it can play at a Grandmaster level as any of the three classes – Terran, Protoss or Zerg – and is better than 99.8% of human players on Blizzard’s Battle.net.

Related: Best multiplayer games

More importantly, it’s reached this ability despite being hampered by the same limitations that human players face. It has the same camera view, limited knowledge of the map, and its actions per minute are capped to what a human’s reflexes could potentially achieve.   

As with Go, this is all entirely self-taught. The idea is that this general-purpose learning could help in other aspects of AI and robotics from self-driving cars to object recognition systems.

The history of progress in artificial intelligence has been marked by milestone achievements in games,” said DeepMind’s David Silver who worked on AlphaStar. “Ever since computers cracked Go, chess and poker, StarCraft has emerged by consensus as the next grand challenge. 

“The game’s complexity is much greater than chess, because players control hundreds of units; more complex than Go, because there are 10^26 possible choices for every move; and players have less information about their opponents than in poker.”

Related: Best strategy games

Unlike with Go, where DeepMind beat the world’s human champions, AlphaStar isn’t quite the best in the world. There’s still that elusive 0.2% of human players that should beat it if matched up, but given its progress, it’s likely only a matter of time before it’s unbeatable by humankind.

Why trust our journalism?

Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.

Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.

author icon

Editorial independence

Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.

author icon

Professional conduct

We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.

Trusted Reviews Logo

Sign up to our newsletter

Get the best of Trusted Reviews delivered right to your inbox.

This is a test error message with some extra words