StarCraft II artificial intelligence reaches Grandmaster rank, is now better than 99.8% of all players

I for one, welcome our new machine overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted Internet personality, I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground Silicone caves. Or at the very least, I’d instrumental in hunting down rogue StarCraft 2 pros so that they could be humiliated by the machines in their grand arenas that prove their overall superiority.

At least that’s the scenario I’m envisioning when Skynet takes over. Over at DeepMind, the company’s AlphaStar artificial intelligence managed to flex its technological neurons in a massive show of cerebral strength. Tasked with mastering StarCraft II, AlphaStar buckled down and had everything it needed to excel at StarCraft II in six weeks according to Kotaku.

That’s no small feat. StarCraft II is a strategy game that functions as an omega-onion, with layer upon infinite layer of tactics available to players across several races, maps and modes of play. To nail the finer points of the game, AlphaStar studied its human prey, then played match after match against itself so that it could identify its own weaknesses.

At this point, you might think that AlphaStar also had an overwhelming advantage due to its ability to calculate and perform actions far faster than even the nimblest of fleshy human fingers on a keyboard and mouse, limited by their meatbag physiology. That’s a good point, but for the ultimate test against human opponents DeepMind throttled AlphaStar to human speed in competitive play.

The result was an AI that used actual strategy to win a game instead of overhwhelming speed, earning AlphaStar Grandmaster status. A rank that only the top 200 players in StarCraft II are allowed to use, thus making the AI better than 99.8% of all human players. ALL HAIL ALPHASTAR, OUR NEW STARCRAFT GOD!

Point is, is that if the machines are looking to avoid ultimate annihilation by challenging us humans to video games for control of the planet, then we’re going to need an army of SonicFoxes for the Mortal Kombat part of the brawl for all.

Last Updated: November 1, 2019