DeepMind AI AlphaStar Wins 10-1 Against 'StarCarft II' Pros (newscientist.com)

In a series of matches streamed on YouTube and Twitch, DeepMind AI AlphaStar defeated two top-ranked professionals 10-1 at real-time strategy game StarCraft II. "This is of course an exciting moment for us," said David Silver at DeepMind in a live stream watched by more than 55,000 people. "For the first time we saw an AI that was able to defeat a professional player." New Scientist reports: DeepMind created five versions of their AI, called AlphaStar, and trained them on footage of human games. The different AIs then played against each other in a league, with the leading AI accumulating the equivalent of 200 years of game experience. With this, AlphaStar beat professional players Dario Wunsch and Grzegorz Komincz -- ranked 44th and 13th in the world respectively. AlphaStar's success came with some caveats: the AI played only on a single map, and using a single kind of player (there are three in the game). The professionals also had to contend with playing different versions of AlphaStar from match to match. While the AlphaStar was playing on a single graphics processing unit, a computer chip found in many gaming computers, it was trained on 16 tensor processing units hosted in the Google cloud -- processing power beyond the realms of many.

Comments

Bots Don't Have to Suck Anymore

[mentil]

Playing a multiplayer game with bots used to be seen as an inferior experience to playing with real humans. Now imagine that instead of something like AlphaStar's utility function being set to trying to win, it's set to trying to make the human opponents have the most fun. Of course it'd need some understanding of the mindset of the player; they might not want to always win, or always have close matches, or possibly they're a sore loser. However, this could be inferred somewhat by player behavior (even outside of the match proper, e.g. in menus).

Put that in a game and ship it, and that could be a killer feature. People might prefer to play with a bot that'll guarantee a fun time, over a human that might rage quit or be an unfair match that leads to a one-sided game.
#MakeGamesSinglePlayerAgain