Machines

StarCraft as the hard problem. Bot competitions and BWAPI, the Berkeley Overmind, Facebook's TorchCraft, and DeepMind's AlphaStar, which beat professional players in 2019 and reached Grandmaster, on a game whose imperfect information and vast action space made it the benchmark after chess and Go fell.

Part of StarCraft

24 moments in this segment.

1. 2010-11-05 - The 2010 AIIDE StarCraft AI Competition. Highlights from the AIIDE 2010 bot competition hosted by UC Santa Cruz, including the Berkeley Overmind zerg bot and a bot-versus-human exhibition.
2. 2011-06-18 - Inside the AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition. An overview of the AIIDE 2010 competition explaining the AI techniques the entrant bots used, submitted to the 2011 AAAI video competition.
3. 2011-10-15 - AIIDE 2011: Man versus Machine. Commentary on the human-versus-bot exhibition at AIIDE 2011, organised by the University of Alberta and held at Stanford.
4. 2013-08-01 - What SSCAIT Is. An introduction to the Student StarCraft AI Tournament, in which students worldwide write C++ and Java bots against the BWAPI interface.
5. 2016-01-30 - SSCAIT 2015 Grand Finals. The grand final of the Student StarCraft AI Tournament's 2015 mixed division, a long-running BWAPI bot competition.
6. 2016-11-04 - The StarCraft II Feature Layer API. DeepMind's demonstration of the machine-learning API announced with Blizzard at BlizzCon 2016, which opened StarCraft II to AI researchers.
7. 2017-08-10 - Trained and Untrained Agents Play a Full StarCraft II Game. DeepMind's side-by-side showing an early-stage agent failing to keep workers mining next to a trained agent, published with the SC2LE environment release.
8. 2017-10-03 - AIIDE 2017: Facebook's CherryPi versus PurpleWave. A match from the 2017 AIIDE StarCraft AI competition featuring Facebook AI Research's CherryPi bot, built on TorchCraft.
9. 2018-12-19 - AlphaStar vs TLO and MaNa - Game Highlights. DeepMind's highlight reel of the 19 December 2018 test matches in which AlphaStar beat Team Liquid's MaNa 5-0, following a benchmark series against TLO.
10. 2019-01-24 - AlphaStar: The Inside Story. DeepMind's own account of building AlphaStar, the first AI to beat a top professional StarCraft II player, released alongside the January 2019 demonstration.
11. 2019-01-24 - The DeepMind StarCraft II Demonstration. The full live broadcast from DeepMind's London office on 24 January 2019, revealing AlphaStar's 5-0 results against TLO and MaNa with commentary by Artosis and RotterdaM.
12. 2019-01-27 - MaNa on Playing AlphaStar. Grzegorz 'MaNa' Komincz recounts travelling to DeepMind's office and playing the AlphaStar matches, from the human competitor's side.
13. 2019-01-28 - Artosis Analyses AlphaStar. A long-form community analysis of AlphaStar's play, streamed on 28 January 2019, days after the DeepMind demonstration.
14. 2019-04-29 - Oriol Vinyals on AlphaStar, StarCraft and Language. A long-form interview with DeepMind's AlphaStar research co-lead, himself a former competitive StarCraft player, on the project and on sequence models.
15. 2019-07-23 - David Silver: Deep Reinforcement Learning from AlphaGo to AlphaStar. DeepMind's David Silver, AlphaStar co-lead, lectures at the University of Alberta on 23 July 2019 about the reinforcement-learning line from AlphaGo to AlphaStar.
16. 2019-10-16 - Vinyals: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II. Oriol Vinyals presents the AlphaStar work at a technical conference, covering why StarCraft II was chosen as an AI grand challenge.
17. 2019-11-02 - Reading the AlphaStar Nature Paper. A technical walkthrough of DeepMind's 'Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning', explaining league training.
18. 2019-11-15 - AlphaStar vs TLO - The Unreleased Internal Game. Artosis analyses a previously unreleased internal DeepMind game, contrasting AlphaStar's human-like decisions with its inhuman ones.
19. 2019-12-03 - AlphaStar Reaches Grandmaster Level. A summary of the October 2019 Nature result in which AlphaStar reached Grandmaster rank on the European ladder playing all three races.
20. 2020-10-03 - AlphaStar: How Google Infrastructure Made It Possible. Vinyals' keynote on the distributed computing infrastructure behind AlphaStar's league training.
21. 2020-12-15 - From AlphaGo to AlphaStar and Beyond. Oriol Vinyals' university lecture tracing DeepMind's game-playing agents from AlphaGo through AlphaStar.
22. 2023-08-19 - Bot Versus Bot at the ProBots Tournament. A cast match between two custom-built StarCraft II AIs from the ProBots tournament, part of the ongoing community AI competition circuit.
23. 2026-01-05 - The Best StarCraft II AIs of 2026. A review of the state of StarCraft II bot development in 2026, seven years after AlphaStar reached Grandmaster.
24. 2026-03-07 - The 2026 SC2 AI Arena Tournament Finals. Finals day of the 2026 AI Arena StarCraft II bot tournament, the community competition that continues the AIIDE and SSCAIT lineage.