Many recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) would potentially not have been possible without the help of games.
Especially video games with their complex worlds and large action spaces offer unique testbeds for advanced AI methods. Breakthroughs that have first been invented to beat the best human players in games such as Go or Poker are now being applied in many different domains such as healthcare or improving the efficiency of power grids. While machines have surpassed human-level performance in many games already, some video games such as StarCraft are still too complex for even the most advanced AI methods. In this lecture I will tell you about the recent progress in this field and how letting machines play games could ultimately allow them to learn and to think more like humans.