Life is like a game

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’.
If you have a question or feedback on the series, message us on Twitter (@DeepMind (twitter.com/deepmindai?lang=en) using the hashtag #DMpodcast) or emailing us at podcast@deepmind.com.
Further reading
• The Economist: Why AI researchers like video games (economist.com/science-and-technology/2017/05/1…)
• DeepMind blogs: Capture the Flag (deepmind.com/blog/article/capture-the-flag-sci…) and Alphastar (deepmind.com/blog/article/alphastar-mastering-…)
• Professional StarCraft II player MaNa gives his impressions of AlphaStar and DeepMind (youtube.com/watch?v=zgIFoepzhIo&feature=yo…)
• Open AI’s work on Dota 2 (openai.com/five)
• The New York Times: DeepMind can now beat us at multiplayer games, too (nytimes.com/2019/05/30/science/deep-mind-artif…)
• Royal Society: Machine Learning resources (royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/machin…)
• DeepMind: The Inside Story of AlphaStar (youtube.com/watch?v=UuhECwm31dM)
• Andrej Karpathy: Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels (karpathy.github.io/2016/05/31/rl)
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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