Which DeepMind AI reached Grandmaster level in StarCraft II in 2019?

DeepMind’s AlphaStar reached Grandmaster level in StarCraft II in 2019.

AlphaStar was developed by DeepMind to play Blizzard Entertainment’s real-time strategy game StarCraft II. Unlike chess or Go, StarCraft II requires managing incomplete information, gathering resources, producing units, controlling armies, and making many decisions simultaneously.

In January 2019, DeepMind announced that AlphaStar had defeated professional players Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz and Dario “TLO” Wünsch in exhibition matches. Later that year, a version of AlphaStar played anonymously on Blizzard’s European Battle.net ladder and achieved Grandmaster status, placing it among the top 0.2% of human players in the region.

AlphaStar’s achievement is sometimes confused with AlphaZero, another DeepMind system that mastered chess, shogi, and Go through self-play. AlphaStar used neural networks and reinforcement learning, but its StarCraft II results were specific to the game’s rules, maps, interface, and competitive environment.