Google's artificial intelligence team DeepMind sets its sights on StarCraft 2

At BlizzCon on Friday, Google research scientist Oriol Vinyals announced that StarCraft 2 was being opened up to artificial intelligence researchers around the world. The goal: to create better AI opponents for StarCraft 2, and possibly even create AI coaches that could teach humans how to better play the strategy game.

Of course, the goal of AI development is not just to match human players but best them, and just as DeepMind's AI program AlphaGo beat human champion Go player Lee Se-dol earlier this year, DeepMind wants its AI to someday take on a human StarCraft 2 champion.

There will be more details about DeepMind's interest in StarCraft 2 revealed later during the convention, and we'll update you if we hear anything else. (Unless, of course, the AI has already taken over by then.)

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.