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Blizzard's StarCraft 2 shall be used as a game development studio by Google's DeepMind as a testing platform for artificial intelligence and machine learning environment. It shall be opening the environment worldwide.

This announcement was made during Blizzards Blizzcon conference on Sunday. Both the companies will build an open research environment which would be used by anyone around the world including DeepMind itself.

DeepMind and Star Craft2 team has worked together to develop an API that supports something similar as the previous bots which were written with a scripted interface. Hence allowing programmatic control of individual units and there would be access to the full game state.

Now the agents will play directly from pixels. To reach there both the companies have developed a new image based interface which outputs a low-resolution RGB image data for map and minimap. There would be options to break out features into separate layers like unit type, unit health and terrain height field.

Both these companies are also working on creating curriculum scenarios which are a ladder of increasingly complex tasks so that AI researchers of all levels can get their systems running.

Benchmark algorithms along with Star Craft 2 will be having editing tools to enable flexibility and control for those researchers who are going to participate.

The boundaries of AI shall be pushed by DeepMind as it is developing programs that are capable of learning and can solve any complex problems without providing any guidelines.

DeepMind has also used 2D games on Atari and complex games like go to test the AI system. DeepMind further opines that Star Craft2 is like real world environment which the company has never used before for the sake of testing.

Further, it is believed that while playing StarCraft 2 the AI system has to come with real time strategies when choosing amongst the three different races at the start of the game.