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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - What SSCAIT Is. An introduction to the Student StarCraft AI Tournament, in which students worldwide write C++ and Java bots against the BWAPI interface.
- - SSCAIT 2015 Grand Finals. The grand final of the Student StarCraft AI Tournament's 2015 mixed division, a long-running BWAPI bot competition.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - MaNa on Playing AlphaStar. Grzegorz 'MaNa' Komincz recounts travelling to DeepMind's office and playing the AlphaStar matches, from the human competitor's side.
- - Artosis Analyses AlphaStar. A long-form community analysis of AlphaStar's play, streamed on 28 January 2019, days after the DeepMind demonstration.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - Reading the AlphaStar Nature Paper. A technical walkthrough of DeepMind's 'Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning', explaining league training.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - AlphaStar: How Google Infrastructure Made It Possible. Vinyals' keynote on the distributed computing infrastructure behind AlphaStar's league training.
- - From AlphaGo to AlphaStar and Beyond. Oriol Vinyals' university lecture tracing DeepMind's game-playing agents from AlphaGo through AlphaStar.
- - 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.
- - 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.
- - 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.
