Following the historic Go match last month, which ended in a 4-1 victory for the artificial intelligence software AlphaGo, the AI software’s developer Google DeepMind has said that its next target could be real-time strategy game StarCraft.

Over the past weeks, top officials from DeepMind, and Blizzard, the developer behind the online game, have met to have discussions for the possible return match between humanity and AI on a different battle field.

During his visit to Seoul on Friday to take part in the annual game competition Heroes of the Storm World Championship, Blizzard CEO Michael Morhaime expressed excitement in the possible showdown between a human StarCraft professional player and AI.

“We think StarCraft will be a great milestone on the road to developing AI that can learn things strategically and be fed new information,” CEO Morhaime said.

He anticipated that AlphaGo would not be able to seal a victory, at least for the time being, as the extremely strategic nature of StarCraft will make it difficult for the computer program to master the game.

“The level of strategic depth for StarCraft pros is incredible and I think it would be very difficult for a computer to reproduce that,” the CEO said.

He emphasized that both sides will have to come up with measures to make a level playing field as the software has some advantages that might give it an unfair upper hand against human players.

“You have to do something to restrict the actual actions that computers can take, if unrestricted it would be unfair,” he said.

CEO Morhaime declined to say more about the StarCraft match, saying that no details, including schedule and rules, have been fixed yet.

“We also have to be careful not to get too far ahead of the story. I think we don’t want to put undue pressure on Google as they haven’t made any decision yet,” he added.

Google Korea’s communications head Lois Kim said “nothing for the possible match has been set yet.”

By Kim Young-won (wone0102@heraldcorp.com)