StarCraft, a hugely popular space-fiction-themed strategy computer game, will soon be accessible to advanced AI players. Teaching computers to play the board game Go is impressive, but if we really want to push the limits of machine intelligence, perhaps they’ll need to learn to rush a Zerg or set a trap for a horde of invading Protoss ships. The new version of StarCraft II includes a range of simplified outputs (shown on the left) to aid machine learning.