The first Main Stage panel to be featured on the second day of Blizzard 2016 was "DeepMind and StarCraft 2 Deep Learning". After a short introduction from the beloved Starcraft shoutcaster Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski, Google DeepMind's Orial Vinyals took the stage.

Vinyals started off by offering a brief explanation of reinforcement learning.

He went on to emphasize how perfect games are as a platform for building and refining frameworks.

Torcs was one of the games DeepMind tackled before moving on to more daunting challenges.

DeepMind's latest and greatest achievement - AlphaGo's victory over Sedol Lee.

Blizzard became interested in working with DeepMind after watching AlphaGo dominate.

DeepMind was also interested in the challenges StarCraft 2 would pose. A partnership was born.

Blizzard's senior software engineer Kevin Calderone came up next to provide the specifics.

All contemporary games' AI are scripted by the developers.

What DeepMind promises to try is completely different.

A short clip of how DeepMind will process StarCraft 2 visual information.

An official StarCraft 2 API with all necessary tools will be released to the public soon.

The session signed off with a Q&A segment with some of the major minds behind the project.