Article Image

Artificial intelligence still can't beat pro human players at 'Starcraft'

Professional Starcraft player Song Byung-gu recently defeated four different bots trained to play the game, taking less than half an hour to secure victory in all four of the matches.

We’ve seen various showdowns in recent years between human players and artificial intelligence in games like Go. While A.I. has held the upper hand in games like Go, a professional Starcraft player took on four different computer systems this week, and came away as the victor.

Sejong University in South Korea played host to the exhibition, where Song Byung-gu managed to defeat four different bots in just under half an hour, according to a report from Hexus. The longest game lasted ten and a half minutes, while the shortest came to an end in less than five.

One bot, known as CherryPi, was developed by Facebook’s A.I. research lab, while the others came from teams in Australia, Norway, and Korea. Deepmind, the Google subsidiary responsible for the much-publicized AlphaGo project, did not take part, even though it recently collaborated with Blizzard to release AI research tools for Starcraft II.

Games like Go have a finite number of possible moves, and a playing field that’s relatively easy for an A.I. to analyze. By comparison, Starcraft offers up a great deal more complexity – and that’s what makes it such an appealing task for A.I. researchers. Now that the likes of Go have been comprehensively cracked, it’s time to take on new challenges.

The bots that competed against Song were capable of carrying out as many as 19,000 actions per minute, while even the best players can only manage a few hundred. However, there isn’t as much training data available for the A.I.s to learn from, which is being cited as the reason that they’re so far behind their human opponents.

Several professional Starcraft players have indicated that they would put their reputation on the line in a televised event, along the lines of the AlphaGo series of matches that featured professional Go player Lee Sedol.

“We professional gamers initiate combat only when we stand a chance of victory with our army and unit-control skills,” Song told the MIT Technology Review when asked about the difference between human players and A.I. He went on to praise his synthetic opponent’s defensive unit management as “stunning.”

Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.

How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?

Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind. 

The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year). 

Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?

According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.