This interview, dated yesterday, doesn’t go quite that far—he mentions Starcraft as a possibility, but explicitly says that they won’t necessarily pursue it.
If the series continues this way with AlphaGo winning, what’s next — is there potential for another AI-vs-game showdown in the future?
I think for perfect information games, Go is the pinnacle. Certainly there are still other top Go players to play. There are other games — no-limit poker is very difficult, multiplayer has its challenges because it’s an imperfect information game. And then there are obviously all sorts of video games that humans play way better than computers, like StarCraft is another big game in Korea as well. Strategy games require a high level of strategic capability in an imperfect information world — “partially observed,” it’s called. The thing about Go is obviously you can see everything on the board, so that makes it slightly easier for computers.
Is beating StarCraft something that you would personally be interested in?
Maybe. We’re only interested in things to the extent that they are on the main track of our research program. So the aim of DeepMind is not just to beat games, fun and exciting though that is. And personally you know, I love games, I used to write computer games. But it’s to the extent that they’re useful as a testbed, a platform for trying to write our algorithmic ideas and testing out how far they scale and how well they do and it’s just a very efficient way of doing that. Ultimately we want to apply this to big real-world problems.
This interview, dated yesterday, doesn’t go quite that far—he mentions Starcraft as a possibility, but explicitly says that they won’t necessarily pursue it.