In August 2017 Google’s DeepMind and Blizzard released the SC2LE - making Starcraft 2 an AI research environment. This was after they beat the best humans in GO. How hard can a popular RTS game be, right?

Turns out - very hard. But modern AI techniques are getting increasingly better at tackling more complex and open ended games - so good in fact that the world records in many classic games are now held by bots.

In this talk we’ll cover the main historic steps of AI progress in the domain of games - from simple challenges like Chess to harder ones like Mario Kart (yes, in that order). Last, we’ll see why solving execution-focused games is an important precursor to future AI applications.