Not Only Did AlphaStar Artificial Intelligence Beat professional StarCraft II Gamers, But It Also Unintentionally Had Expertise In Ecology.

As an ecologist at the University of Rennes, France, he spends most of his time with plants. But there is one game that has captured his affection since he was a child: StarCraft, a famous series of strategy games in which players accumulate resources and build alien legions to fight on zones outer space. "I'm not a good player," Barbe said. "But enough for me to understand what's going on in the game."

While playing StarCraft II - the latest in the series - a few years ago, Barbe realized that, apart from the explosions or the laser beam, something else was going on. StarCraft has something of an ecosystem. "We have an environment," says Barbe. We have resources. We have organisms that are competing for the environment. That is the basic definition of an ecosystem. ”

Barbe then temporarily dismissed this idea. Then comes 2019, when DeepMind, Alphabet's artificial intelligence research company, comes up with an AI called AlphaStar and has it play against the top StarCraft II players around the world. AlphaStar outperformed 99.8% of players, achieved Grandmaster rank - the highest rating in the game, and also added another victory to the AI "title room".

And then, Barbe realized that, AlphaStar's power can go beyond manipulating aliens on a fictional star. If StarCraft behaves like an ecosystem, maybe the algorithms for gaming would be helpful in studying ecological problems on Earth.

Writing in Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2020, Barbe, along with other ecologists from the University of Rennes and Brigham Young University, explained StarCraft's ability to manage complex, multidimensional functions. can be transformed to test ideas for real-world ecological models, which is very difficult with traditional models. For example, ecologists were able to deploy AlphaStar on StarCraft maps that were designed for real resource distribution, to model how different organisms react to disturbances such as species. invasion or loss of habitat.

AlphaStar's algorithm, according to Barbe, may have unintentionally become the most sophisticated ecological model ever.

This idea is part of a recent trend in ecology to use powerful artificial intelligence tools to analyze environmental problems. Although not as popular in the past 15 or 20 years, scientists say industry applications of AI are exploding in recent times, from differentiation of wild species to prediction of ladybug proliferation. in pine forests. Biologists think AI tools, combined with their ability to collect large amounts of data about the Earth, could modify the way ecosystems are studied and increase their ability to predict how they change. Complex algorithms like AlphaStar - often developed with an original purpose unrelated to ecology - can help such studies go far.