For instance, researchers could deploy AlphaStar agents on StarCraft maps designed to mimic realistic resource distributions, in order to model how different organisms respond to disturbances like invasive species or habitat loss.

Writing in Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2020, Barbe, along with other ecologists from Université de Rennes and Brigham Young University, explain how AlphaStar’s abilities to manage the complex, multidimensional dynamics of StarCraft could be repurposed to test ideas about the dynamics of real-world ecosystems that have flummoxed traditional models. If StarCraft functions a lot like an ecosystem, maybe game-playing algorithms could help study ecological problems on Earth. It occurred to Barbe that AlphaStar’s powers might not be limited to manipulating aliens on a virtual planet. AlphaStar trounced 99.8 percent of human players, achieving the coveted distinction of Grandmaster - the game’s highest rank - and adding another victory for computers in the march to AI supremacy. Then, in 2019, DeepMind, the AI research subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, pitted an AI agent called AlphaStar against some of the world’s best players of StarCraft II. That’s the definition of an ecosystem.”īarbe filed the idea away. We have organisms that are competing in this environment. StarCraft was behaving a lot like an ecosystem. While playing StarCraft II - the latest version of the game - a few years ago, Barbe realized that amid all the explosions and lasers, something else was happening.

“I’m not at all a very good player,” says Barbe. But one game has captured his imagination since childhood: StarCraft, the popular online strategy franchise in which players accrue resources and construct armies of alien fighters to wage war across extraterrestrial landscapes. As an ecologist at the Université de Rennes in France, he spends most of his time with plants. Lou Barbe wouldn’t call himself an avid gamer.

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