DeepMind and Blizzard go to Starcraft II

I imagine that everyone who cares has seen the DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment announcement. Apparently DeepMind’s Google power and AlphaGo prestige, plus the fact that it just plain makes sense for all parties, were enough to negotiate official support from Blizzard.

Of course details are vague for now. That’s how announcements go. The availability promises I see are that it will be open “to AI and Machine Learning researchers” and “be open and available to all researchers next year.” Does that include hobbyists, or only people with some kind of research credentials? I’m sure Blizzard will have concerns about cheating and will address them one way or another.

I originally wasn’t going to post about this, but one line caught my attention: “We recognise the efforts of the developers and researchers from the Brood War community in recent years.” To me it sounds like they realize that they may be undercutting Brood War and BWAPI, and hope to avoid hard feelings.

Anyway, this is good news for DeepMind, good news for Blizzard (though I think they should have thought of it on their own and done it themselves earlier!) and good news for AI. And except for stealing any good ideas they may publish, I plan to pretty much ignore it on the theory that it doesn’t touch BWAPI world.

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LetaBot on Sunday, November 6. 2016:

I would be fine with you writing a post about BWAPI algorithms that can be transferred to SC2.

Even anything else related to SC2 AI would be interesting tbh.

krasi0 on Monday, November 7. 2016:

I've already posted a bit untactful opinion on FB:
I don't get why all the hype?! Broodwar and Starcraft 2 are two very different games, where I and many other people believe that Broodwar is the much better one (although admittedly SC2 has the better graphics). Additionally, for the purpose of AI research IMO BWAPI will remain much better suited as Broodwar itself is much more lightweight and allows for running simulations at close to 3000 FPS. On top of that, tscmoo is actively working on an open BW engine would should improve the developing and testing environment even further.

This whole piece of news sounds more like a PR stunt of Blizzard to rekindle the dying interest in SC2 and for Google to show off Deepmind => Tensorflow (a good product). And guess where Tensorflow runs the best? Right! Google cloud! ;)

I agree with you that in short and medium turn, such news and possible continuation wouldn't affect BWAPI world. I would imagine some BW AI newbies to jump on the hype bandwagon with SC2API, but that would hardly make much sense to any serious AI researchers at this point unless the sole purpose is publicity.

Jay Scott on Monday, November 7. 2016:

My read is that Google wants the PR value and Deepmind genuinely wants the testbed to solve new AI problems. It’s funny that two parts of the same organization want different things, but not unusual. :-) Unfortunately publicity and research pull in opposite direction; publicity wants to win and quit without wasting any more money and without allowing space for an alternative narrative to come out. We see that in AlphaGo, just as in Deep Blue in the 1990s. And yet both champion programs made advances and inspired progress, so the AI goal is not ruined. Go programs are improving at awesome speed right now as hobbyist and commercial programmers race to catch up, and AI as a field picked up more proponents (hugely so in Korea). I say, let DeepMind take the PR money and run with it! With money and time they should make advances that we can steal for our game. Anyway, it’s fun to talk about but there’s no point in arguing about the future when the choices are already made. We can just wait and see what happens!

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