Now, DeepMind and Blizzard are opening the doors to that environment, with new tools including a machine learning API, a large game replay dataset, an open source DeepMind toolset and more.
The new release of the StarCraft II API on the Blizzard side includes a Linux package made to be able to run in the cloud, as well as support for Windows and Mac. It also has support for offline AI vs. AI matches, and those anonymized game replays from actual human players for training up agents, which is starting out at 65,000 complete matches, and will grow to over 500,000 over the course of the next few weeks.
The whole goal here is to come up with AI that can play StarCraft II better than any human can, in much the same way that DeepMind did with its AlphaGo software for playing the ancient physical board game of Go. DeepMind wants this to propel the existing research forward, hence its appeal to larger research community and this open release of tools.
