Page 100 - PC Gamer - UK (February 2020)

TECH
REPORT

Alphabet’s CEO
Sundar Pichai Photo by Google

GG, ROBOT

How a team of AI researchers took on all comers at StarCraft II

nyone who’s played a single-player videogames, something perhaps unsurprising since its CEO is
videogame recently – and the chances one Demis Hassabis, who readers with long memories might
are you have – will appreciate the very recall. Having contributed some level design to Bullfrog’s
special kind of artificial stupidity Syndicate (1993), Hassabis became co-designer and lead
A necessary to make you feel like you’re programmer on 1994’s Theme Park, which went on to sell ten
getting a decent challenge, but that it was your finely million copies. He was 17 at the time. Play to
honed skills that finally allowed you to triumph rather AlphaStar runs on Google’s proprietary tensor processing learn
than pre-programmed flaws in AI strategy. units (TPUs), which are application-specific integrated circuits
In 2018, Elon
(ASICs) developed specifically for neural network machine Musk’s OpenAI
Putting up a stiff challenge without cheating – no reading the learning. These are the same chips that form the back-end think-tank
player’s inputs, reacting to the first frame of an attack or of services such as Google Photos, where one can process showed that an
psychically knowing where his units are – is a difficult thing to over 100 million photos a day, and Google Street View, where AI could develop
code. But what if you wanted your AI to crush all its enemies they, impressively, extracted all of the text in the Street View skills just for the
love of curiosity
and see them driven before it? Perhaps becoming good database in less than five days. rather than for
enough at a game to be in the top 98 per cent of players? All The use of the word ‘tensor’ naturally throws up explicit rewards.
without cheating? That would be even more difficult. comparisons to the tensor cores that enable DLSS in Nvidia’s Taught to be
A team from Google has done it, however. The AlphaStar RTX GPUs, but compared to the graphics chip, TPUs are less curious, with
a drive to
AI from DeepMind triumphed over puny humans in a series of precise and lack any hardware for texturing and rasterisation
experience new
blind games (the meatbags had no idea they were playing but can rattle through high volumes of computation at a things, the AI
against an AI) of StarCraft II on Battle.net. It did rather well, remarkable rate. Google deploys its third-generation TPUs in preferred to
achieving Grandmaster level and out-performing 99.8 per pods of up to 1,024 chips. “Each of these pods is now well over watch TV and
play videogames,
cent of players on European servers. 100 petaflops,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent
StarCraft II has emerged by consensus as the next big company Alphabet, at the company’s annual I/O conference proving that
these are good
challenge for AI now that it’s mastered chess, go, and in Mountain View, California. “This is what allows us to develop things to do.
Jeopardy. While IBM’s latest supercomputer takes on the better [machine learning] models, larger models, more Or something.
Cambridge Union in a debate, the DeepMind team chose accurate models and helps us tackle even bigger problems.

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