First the bots came for Dota 2. Now they’re making a run at StarCraft II. And this time, you’ll get to take them on yourself.
If you live in Europe, you’ll soon be able to opt in to playing ladder matches against DeepMind’s StarCraft II agent, AlphaStar, which will play matches anonymously against human players. Those matches will affect MMR as normal.
AlphaStar will not have any inherent advantages over human players. It will only know the map details as revealed by its units and its actions-per-minute (APM) will be capped.
Once AlphaStar has played enough matches, “the team at DeepMind will use the results to inform their ongoing research into artificial intelligence,” according to the FAQ. They say the results will be published in a peer-reviewed paper, but will that come before or after the AI evolves into Skynet and takes over the planet?
