杏吧原创

Artificial intelligence has a new target in its cross hairs for 2017: . Like other gamers before them, StarCraft fans may soon be forced to bow down to their machine overlords, as some of the biggest AI research groups set out to beat the best human players.

, cofounder of Google-owned firm DeepMind, and , who leads the Google Brain project, have both hinted that StarCraft will be their next target, while Facebook researchers have just designed to help people develop AI to play the game.

Succeeding in StarCraft would be a show of strategic strength. AI鈥檚 gaming prowess reached new heights in March when DeepMind鈥檚 AlphaGo system defeated one of the world鈥檚 best Go players, Lee Sedol. The AI鈥檚 ability to win at Go was particularly impressive owing to the complexity of the ancient Chinese game. There are more possible moves in Go than there are atoms in the universe, so AlphaGo couldn鈥檛 work out its strategy simply by 鈥渟olving鈥� the game. Instead, its neural networks were trained using a database of 30 million moves made by expert human players. The software could then evaluate how each potential move in a real-life game would alter its overall chance of victory, allowing it to choose the best one.

But winning at StarCraft is a different challenge. These popular video games involve building huge armies to battle against each other over a large virtual terrain. Players can鈥檛 see exactly what their opponents are up to, so they have to make decisions based on incomplete information 鈥� just like in the real world. Mastering the chaos in StarCraft will therefore have implications beyond video games: it should improve AI鈥檚 ability to deal with reality.

Software teams have been battling StarCraft-playing AIs against each other for years in the , but when pitted against humans, the best flesh-and-blood players still have the edge. That could change in 2017.

鈥淢astering the chaos of StarCraft should help AIs deal with reality鈥�

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淕amers in AI鈥檚 cross hairs鈥�