Very interesting stuff. Allowing researchers to build AIs that operate on either game state or visual data is a great step, IMO. Being able to limit actions-pe

Very interesting stuff. Allowing researchers to build AIs that operate on either game state or visual data is a great step, IMO. Being able to limit actions-per-minute is also very wise. The excellent BWAPI library for Starcraft Broodwar that is referenced (https://github.com/bwapi/bwapi https://github.com/bwapi/bwapi) provides game state - and was presumably used by Facebook to do their research earlier this year (http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.02993 http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.02993). For mine, the significant new challenges here not present in Go are the partial observability of the game and the limited time window in which decisions need to be made. Even at 24 frames per second, the AI would only have 40 milliseconds to decide what to do in response to that frame. This is more relevant to online learning architectures. The open questions here are how freely this will be available - and in what form. Will I need to buy a special version of the game? Clearly there will be some protection or AI detection - to ensure that competitive human play is not ruined either by human-level bots, if they can truly be developed, or by sub-par bots. Starcraft 2 (presumably the latest expansion, Legacy of the Void, will be used here) does not run on Linux, whereas most GPU-based deep learning toolkits are, so having a bridge between the game and AI server may be necessary for some researchers. Besides being great for AI researchers, this is probably good for Blizzard too, since it will bring more interest to the Starcraft series. 2017 can't come soon enough.