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By Clare O’Gara
Mon | Nov 4, 2019 | 8:15 AM PST

For the human players in this AI experiment, the result was a resounding Game Over.

DeepMind's new learning algorithm, AlphaStar, just accomplished a landmark achievement in AI development: crushing human competition in intergalactic warfare.

The AI system played the "Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty" video game against professional human gamers.

Technology Review covered the AI victory:

AlphaStar learned to play within an environment called the AlphaStar League. A large neural network first observed replays of expert human games. It was then pitted against versions of itself, using a machine-learning technique called reinforcement learning to improve over time.

Importantly, the program's speed of action, and its view of the battlefield, were limited so that it didn't have an unfair edge over humans.

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