Introduction

Video games have become a favourite tool for AI researchers to test the abilities of their systems. In this episode, Hannah sits down to play StarCraft II - a challenging video game that requires players to control the onscreen action with as many as 800 clicks a minute. She is guided by Oriol Vinyals, an ex-professional StarCraft player and research scientist at DeepMind, who explains how the program AlphaStar learnt to play the game and beat a top professional player. Elsewhere, she explores systems that are learning to cooperate in a digital version of the playground favourite ‘Capture the Flag’.

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Further reading

• The Economist: Why AI researchers like video games
• DeepMind blogs: Capture the Flag and Alphastar
• Professional StarCraft II player MaNa gives his impressions of AlphaStar and DeepMind
• Open AI’s work on Dota 2 
• The New York Times: DeepMind can now beat us at multiplayer games, too
• Royal Society: Machine Learning resources
• DeepMind: The Inside Story of AlphaStar 
• Andrej Karpathy: Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels

Interviewees: Research scientists Max Jaderberg and Raia Hadsell; Lead researchers David Silver and Oriol Vinyals, and Director of Research Koray Kavukcuoglu.

Credits:
Presenter: Hannah Fry
Editor: David Prest
Senior Producer: Louisa Field
Producers: Amy Racs, Dan Hardoon
Binaural Sound: Lucinda Mason-Brown
Music composition: Eleni Shaw (with help from Sander Dieleman and WaveNet)
Commissioned by DeepMind

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