StarCraft II is now a laboratory for AI research

Blizzard’s partnership with DeepMind, a firm that specializes in machine learning, has culminated in the release of the StarCraft II API, which is available now. This mechanism for enabling outside creators into integrate their apps into StarCraft II is going to open up the competitive sci-fi strategy game to researchers working in the field of A.I.

At the 2016 BlizzCon fan gathering in Anaheim, Blizzard revealed that it was working with DeepMind to test the same sort of learning algorithms that helped the company’s AlphaGo A.I. beat some of the top players of the complicated board game, Go.