I was pretty impressed by the Falcon AI earlier this year. He actually used modern reinforcement learning to train from 0 instead of the crappy built in AI. Also, his AI was limited to near-human reaction time (10 frames) which led to a more human-looking agent.

At the end of the day these papers are from master's students. I think they're both impressive in that context.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.06230.pdf