Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Artificial intelligence still can't beat pro human players at 'Starcraft'

By

artificial intelligence beaten by humans starcraft remastered
Image used with permission by copyright holder
We’ve seen various showdowns in recent years between human players and artificial intelligence in games like Go. While A.I. has held the upper hand in games like Go, a professional Starcraft player took on four different computer systems this week, and came away as the victor.

Sejong University in South Korea played host to the exhibition, where Song Byung-gu managed to defeat four different bots in just under half an hour, according to a report from Hexus. The longest game lasted ten and a half minutes, while the shortest came to an end in less than five.

Recommended Videos

One bot, known as CherryPi, was developed by Facebook’s A.I. research lab, while the others came from teams in Australia, Norway, and Korea. Deepmind, the Google subsidiary responsible for the much-publicized AlphaGo project, did not take part, even though it recently collaborated with Blizzard to release AI research tools for Starcraft II.

Games like Go have a finite number of possible moves, and a playing field that’s relatively easy for an A.I. to analyze. By comparison, Starcraft offers up a great deal more complexity – and that’s what makes it such an appealing task for A.I. researchers. Now that the likes of Go have been comprehensively cracked, it’s time to take on new challenges.

The bots that competed against Song were capable of carrying out as many as 19,000 actions per minute, while even the best players can only manage a few hundred. However, there isn’t as much training data available for the A.I.s to learn from, which is being cited as the reason that they’re so far behind their human opponents.

Several professional Starcraft players have indicated that they would put their reputation on the line in a televised event, along the lines of the AlphaGo series of matches that featured professional Go player Lee Sedol.

“We professional gamers initiate combat only when we stand a chance of victory with our army and unit-control skills,” Song told the MIT Technology Review when asked about the difference between human players and A.I. He went on to praise his synthetic opponent’s defensive unit management as “stunning.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Brad Jones
Brad Jones
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…
AMD CEO has good news about the chip shortage, but you still can’t buy a GPU
AMD CEO Lisa Su holding a graphics card.

After more than a year of bad news, AMD CEO Lisa Su finally has some good news about the chip shortage. Speaking with CNBC, the semiconductor executive said the the chip shortage will improve throughout the second half of 2022, though she warned that supply will remain tight until then.

Although we've mainly focused on the GPU shortage, the implications of the chip shortage reach much further. As Su noted in her interview at the Code Conference tech event, the semiconductor industry has always experienced peaks and valleys in balancing supply and demand. "This time, it’s different," she noted.

Read more
Can A.I. beat human engineers at designing microchips? Google thinks so
google artificial intelligence designs microchips photo 1494083306499 e22e4a457632

Could artificial intelligence be better at designing chips than human experts? A group of researchers from Google's Brain Team attempted to answer this question and came back with interesting findings. It turns out that a well-trained A.I. is capable of designing computer microchips -- and with great results. So great, in fact, that Google's next generation of A.I. computer systems will include microchips created with the help of this experiment.

Azalia Mirhoseini, one of the computer scientists of Google Research's Brain Team, explained the approach in an issue of Nature together with several colleagues. Artificial intelligence usually has an easy time beating a human mind when it comes to games such as chess. Some might say that A.I. can't think like a human, but in the case of microchips, this proved to be the key to finding some out-of-the-box solutions.

Read more
5 reasons the iPad Pro can’t replace the MacBook, even with the Magic Keyboard
why ipad pro magic keyboard cant replace macbook typing 1200x9999

When it comes to the iPad, Apple loves to make a controversial statement or two. Remember when CEO Tim Cook said, “Why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?” Or the commercial with the iPad-toting kid that sparked rage in the PC world with the question “What’s a computer?”

Thanks to the iPad Pro’s new Magic Keyboard, you may find yourself agreeing with Mr. Cook and friends. It has all sorts of advantages over a MacBook, and its floating magnetic design is downright cool.

Read more