Artificial intelligence is a relevant topic nowadays. As technology advances more and more, the fact that machines are closer to act and think like humans could be determined by the results of the future partnership between the AI research team DeepMind and the video games company Blizzard.
AI is a subsidiary of Google, DeepMind, a British company of artificial intelligence development that uses games to teach programs to get as closely as possible to the understanding of the human brain.
The programs of this company have been able to solve many video games like Chess and Go, but now it wants to level up and is taking a step further with Blizzard’s game StarCraft II.
This will be a whole new challenge since it is a game that -unlike others- does not give you full information about the tasks and the course of the journey.
As reported by the Guardian, players start on opposite sides of a map and are presented with different tasks: build a base, train soldiers and take out the opponents. This game is designed so that there are 200 actions a minute to be performed and win the opponent.
The mystery part of this is presented in the map of the game. Players can only see the closer parts of where they are while the other parts are hidden in a “fog of war.” To be able to obtain more information about their surroundings, gamers have to send units and then remember what was found to use for future plans. This is what characterizes StarCraft II the most compared to other video games.
Understanding human brain
The partnership will be complete next year, and it will introduce the game to a new environment in which the machines of DeepMind will have to get information and remember it for a long time to solve the issues that will be presenting in the way.
If the results are that the programs actually manage to win the game, this would mean incredible advances regarding understanding how human brains work. It is a hard goal to achieve since the machine will have almost literally to play like a human. It will have to use its memory, to make plans in the long term and adapt them during the game when more information is obtained.
The advantage that DeepMind programs have in here is that they are quicker than humans. They can perform actions faster than what any person could and this may give them some leverage.
With these results it can then be studied if machines can solve real life problems after interacting with the visuals, tasks and lack of information StarCraft II will present them. Along the way, Blizzard will improve the game and make more publicity about it.
Chris Sigaty, executive producer of StarCraft II, believes, as reported by the Guardian, that this a way of getting to a better and more sophisticated game. He is confident that this partnership will only lead to incredible results.
If gamers are interested in participating in this new experience, they onñly have to play the multiplayer game next year, when the partnership is official, and the game has its new platform.
Source: The Guardian