How AlphaStar Became a StarCraft Grandmaster

2020-02-13 Tommy Thompson

One of the biggest headlines in AI research for 2019 was the unveiling of AlphaStar – Google DeepMind’s project to create the worlds best player of Blizzard’s real-time strategy game StarCraft II.  After shocking the world in January as the system defeated two high ranking players in closed competition, an updated version was revealed in November that had achieved grandmaster status: ranking among the top 0.15% in Europe’s 90,000 active players.  So let’s look at how AlphaStar works, the underpinning technology and theory that drives it, the truth behind the media sensationalism and how it achieved grandmaster rank in online multiplayer.

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TommyThompson/20200213/358051/How_AlphaStar_Became_a_StarCraft_Grandmaster.php

Google Colaboratory Notebook and Repository Gallery

2019-11-25 firmai / Derek Snow

“A curated list of repositories with fully functional click-and-run colab notebooks with data, code and description. The code in these repositories are in Python unless otherwise stated.”

Some of the Google Colaboratory Notebooks listed use artificial neural networks. Google Colaboratory Notebooks are Jupyter notebooks that run Python or other code on Google’s cloud for free.

 

Exploring Weight Agnostic Neural Networks

2019-08-27 

When training a neural network to accomplish a given task, be it image classification or reinforcement learning, one typically refines a set of weights associated with each connection within the network. Another approach to creating successful neural networks that has shown substantial progress is neural architecture search, which constructs neural network architectures out of hand-engineered components such as convolutional network components or transformer blocks. It has been shown that neural network architectures built with these components, such as deep convolutional networks, have strong inductive biases for image processing tasks, and can even perform them when their weights are randomly initialized.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/exploring-weight-agnostic-neural.html