About.

Way back in April 2018! -an actual epoch in the machine learning world!- we set out to create this course to help speed up the development of advanced machine learning techniques through a fun platform - mainly - Starcraft 2, hence the name “StarAi”.

For a long time Starcraft has been considered within the machine learning community to be the next “Grand Challenge” for Artificial Intelligence due to several properties of the game including very high state & action spaces, partial observability & multi agent gameplay.

This year Deepmind made significant progress with regards to solving the game. For all intents and purposes, removing the “human limitations” restrictions currently emposed on Deepmind’s system, the game can be said to be solved and am sure we will see even further progress towards the end of the year from Deepmind’s Starcraft team akin to AlphaGo Zero.

Why release the course then? We believe that the way we taught the content - through stories - is unique, and a fun way to learn advanced machine learning & reinforcement learning techniques in a “human” way. We would also be honoured if someone out there takes inspiration from this course that eventually leads to new breakthroughs!

We also believe that RL will have massive impact in the real world in end to end machine learning problems.

For those of you only interested in the Starcraft element of StarAi please refer to the content of week 6 by clicking this link.