Annual Student StarCraft AI Tournament enters its round robin phase

SSCAIT is one of a few major tournaments in the Star Craft: Brood War AI scene. It tends to be one the one that gets the most preparation and biggest releases, since it's the only tournament that broadcasts every single game live on Twitch. The round robin phase will take a few weeks, then it'll enter an elimination bracket.

Brood War bots are, roughly speaking, better than everyone who played the game casually, but not as good as someone who put in a few weeks of serious practice with modern strategies (The highest is roughly ICCUP rank C). They're capable of extremely high APM, and some have extremely impressive micro tricks. Bots tend to be weak by over-microing their units, having poor positional reasoning, and poor overall strategic sense. They all work using BWAPI, a program that snoops Brood War's memory for all the unit positions, censors the stuff a given player isn't supposed to know, and provides functions to issue orders.

A surprise new bot was released late this year - Monster, a Zerg bot that might win the tournament by virtue of just playing very solidly. This would end a few years of Protoss dominating the top ten.

This has been posted before (it's an annual event!) but HN has enjoyed it in previous years. I've also noticed that, when someone posts the tournament to places like HN, the SC AI scene is a lot more active for the following year. This is my nefarious motivation for posting it - I enjoy following the progress.