Blizzard is adding an experimental version of DeepMind's AlphaStar artificial intelligence to StarCraft II's ranked mode. According to a statement on the studio's website, it will be added for a limited number of matches. Testing will take place on the European server.
AlphaStar will play a number of matches with players anonymously. Users will not know that they are fighting artificial intelligence. AI will be subject to certain restrictions, which were introduced after talking with professional players. There will be no unique rewards for defeating the neural network - depending on the victory or defeat, the rating will change in the same way as in a regular match.
The developers said that they decided to run the AI ββanonymously in order to make the experiment objective. Several versions of AlphaStar will be tested on the StarCraft II platform in order to comprehensively evaluate the performance of the neural network. After the end of the experiment, the company will publish the recordings of the matches.
In January 2019, DeepMind and Blizzard hosted a series of show matches between the AlphaStar AI and professional StarCraft II players. At first, the neural network won with a score of 10:0, but the version of the bot used was not affected by the fog of war, which allowed it to observe the actions of cybersportsmen. The version without this feature lost to Grzegorz MaNa Komincz with a score of 0:1.
Source: 3dnews.ru