Page 101 - PC Gamer - UK (February 2020)

HARDWARE

Tech Report

ARTIFICIAL Photo by Goog e

VICTORIES Photo by James the Photographer

When robots win Photo by Carafe at English Wikipedia

THE TURK DEEP BLUE
1 Constructed in 1770 by 2 IBM’s supercomputer
Wolfgang von Kempelen, this won its first game against a
automaton appeared to beat world chess champion, Garry
humans at chess. In reality,a Kasparov, in 1996 in game
small chess master was one of six. Kasparov would go
hidden inside. on to win the match 4-2.

ABOVE: Inside one of
Google’s data centres
Photo by Daniel Panev
in Douglas County,
Georgia, USA.
LEFT: In this
P OCK E T FRIT Z JUDGMENT DAY StarCraft II match,
3 In August 2009, this 4 Originally on 29 August AlphaStar is playing,
chess program won the Copa 1997, the scouring of humans and beating,
Mercosur tournament with by a self-aware AI keeps Grzegorz ‘MaNa’
nine wins and one draw. It changing as Terminator films Komincz, the
was running on an HTC Touch try new wibbly-wobbly Electronic Sports
HD smartphone. timey-wimey tricks. World Cup 2012
champion.

These chips are so powerful that for the first time we’ve had to AlphaStar began its training by watching anonymised
introduce liquid cooling in our data centres.” human games released by Blizzard. It began to imitatethe
strategies, and was soon able to defeat the game’sbuilt-in AI
PLAYING THE FIELD at Elite level around 95 per cent of the time. Of the game’s
According to a paper published in the journal Nature by the three races, initially Protoss was preferred, although
DeepMind team, StarCraft “has emerged as an important eventually AlphaStar would take on the world with Zergand
challenge for artificial intelligence research” thanks to its Terrans too. Different instances of the AI then beganto play
“enduring status among the most difficult professional games against one another, with branches of successful
esports and its relevance to the real world in terms of its raw instances being taken and reintroduced to the leagueas new
complexity and multi-agent challenges”. Unlike chess, the players. It only took 44 days of this to train AlphaStar,
sheer number of ‘pieces’ that are in play in StarCraft poses although DeepMind has estimated that this exposedeach AI
immense challenges to an AI. agent to up to 200 years of realtime StarCraft II play.
The game offers 10^26 Before the onlinematches,
possible legal moves at every the AI was tested against
time-step – the moments Dario ‘TLO’ Wünsch,a pro
when you stop to think what THE GAME OFFERS 10^26 StarCraft II player from
to do next – and that, to use a POSSIBLE LEGAL MOVES AT Germany who playsProtoss
technical term, is a lot. at Grandmaster level.
Nonetheless, the AI was EVERY TIME-STEP AlphaStar beat him5-0. “I
limited to making its moves at was surprised by howstrong
human speed, forcing it to the agent was,” he saidon
triumph through developing winning strategies rather than DeepMind’s blog. “AlphaStar takes well-known strategiesand
blasting its human opponents with a series of superhumanly turns them on their head. The agent demonstratedstrategies
fast manoeuvres. I hadn’t thought of before, which means there maystill be new
Indeed, the DeepMind team had to repeatedly change the ways of playing the game that we haven’t fully exploredyet.”
usernames that their AIs were hiding behind, because other DeepMind hopes its intelligent systems “will oneday help
players noticed that the three (one for each StarCraft II race) us unlock novel solutions to some of the world’s most
agents had played the same number of matches, and were important and fundamental scientific problems”, buttaking
carrying out actions with a speed and precision beyond that of on the world at StarCraft is a serious business in itself,with
mere synapse-based neural pathways. This led to further the prize pool at the 2019 WCS Global Finals taggedat
restrictions being placed on the AI and a rotation of $500,000. As we went to press, it had not yet emergedwhat
usernames to keep opponents in the dark over who they were the DeepMind AI intended to spend its prize moneyon.
really playing against. Ian Evenden

FEBRUARY 2020 101