As we slowly trundle towards the day when our robot overlords gain sentience and take over the world we have news of another project designed to teach artificial intelligence the best way to thrash those puny fleshy human creatures.
Blizzard have teamed up with Google’s DeepMind AI to create a new AI agent called AlphaStar that will soon be playing a small number of games on the competitive ladder in Europe. AlphaStar will play anonymously and will only be matched against those players who opt in to the test.
To make things a little more balanced the AI has build in restrictions to stop if having an unfair advantage. “Like human players, AlphaStar perceives the game using a camera-like view,” say Blizzard. “This means that AlphaStar doesn’t receive information about its opponent unless it is within the camera’s field of view, and it can only move units to locations within its view.” AlphaStar will also be limited in speed and can only take a limited number of actions per minute.
If you are interest in AI then you may like to pop down to London’s Barbican Centre where a new festival-style exhibition “explores creative and scientific developments in AI, demonstrating its potential to revolutionise our lives.”
Starcraft II super player DeepMind will be there along with robot bartenders, art installations, and Lawrence Lek’s project 2065, which is exhibited at the end of the show. This is an open-world video game “set in a speculative future, when advanced automation means that people no longer have to work and can spend all day playing video games.”
You can see some of the exhibits in the video below.
AI: More than Human runs until 26th August and costs £15 during the week and £17 at weekends. You can find out more by following this link.
