They've been talking about it for about a year, but finally yesterday DeepMind (people here may have heard of them before ) and Blizzard released a very full-featured SDK for developing and running bots for Starcraft 2.

DeepMind's press release: https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-and- ... vironment/
Blizzard's post about it: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/20944009

AI researchers have been working on Brood War agents for several years, since the engine was relatively primitive and easier to reverse-engineer, but controlling SC2 was basically impossible without resorting to insane hacks, reading the screen, etc. This API provides a very rich set of features (in the ML sense of the word) and an action interface (which can be capped to human-like APM levels!) to make integration simple, as well as a pared-down Linux SC2 engine for simulating games and outputting replays, so you can run it on GPU instances in the cloud.

Dave Churchill of BWAPI fame has already released a reference implementation and some higher-level utilities: https://github.com/davechurchill/CommandCenter. I guess he had early access, being one of the most well-known BW researchers.

DeepMind's own results (at least the ones revealed in the paper they just published) are very poor so far. My favorite excerpt:


Which just means this is a perfect time to get in on the ground floor of this problem if you're interested in ML and AI!

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The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain, and simple to express: Err, and err, and err again; but less, and less, and less!