If we learned one thing about artificial intelligence in 2017, it's that it's better than most humans at playing almost any game. Almost. As right now, while we've seen AI's destroy human players at Chess, Go and even one on ones in DotA 2, but one game in which AIs have failed to succeed in toppling the pros is StarCraft.
A recent contest was held between human players and four different advanced AIs to see how they compared and for now at least, humans are still way out in front. The human player, in this case pro StarCraft player Song Byung-gu, and he took just 27 minutes to defeat the four different AIs back to back, with the longest game taking 10 and a half minutes, while the shortest was just four and a half.
What's most impressive about this, is that Song wasn't the faster player on the day. Indeed the AIs were not limited in any manner, so they were able to achieve the impossibly high rate of activity of 19,000 actions per minute. It was in tighter micromanagement and in more strategic play, that lead Song to victory over the AI opponents.
As Hexus points out though, none of those AIs present were Google AIs. They weren't the self-taught kind that demolished human players in all manner of games and then went on to evolve again to defeat previous versions of themselves at their own games. If one of them was brought to bear, it might have changed things.
It seems somewhat inevitable that AIs will one day defeat humans at all games, even if this was not that day.
If you want to watch the event in its entirety, you can do so below. The actual gameplay with Song taking on the AI starts at around the 01:50:00 mark.
