Student StarCraft AI Tournament 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Student StarCraft AI Tournament 2014

sscaitournament.com

135 pointstosh29 comments

Years ago, when I first watched the videos of the contest, I was overwhelmed by the micro that an AI plays with a bunch of Mutalisks. It never resembles a human play - among a number of Mutalisks, each Mutalisk could be moved completely indepdendently! Human player would never be able to imitate it.

As a South Korean whose national anthem is considered to be StarCraft Terran Soundtrack[1], I really hope this contest lasts long.

[1] http://youtu.be/GuytViFsZUw

Dont worry. It's been around since 2011 and I'm not planning to leave it.

Damn! I just watched a game Terran vs Protoss, the Protoss did a fast forge expand with two cannons and then expanded to a third base. The terran made a ton of marines and obliterated the third base. But then the AI thought the game should be over because a base got destroyed. So the marines just stuck around and tha AI got caught in a loop, slowing the game down and making the terran lose (maybe loss by using too much CPU).

EDIT: After watching some more, I'm seriously impressed by some of those programs. Cannon rushes, aggressive expanding, managing siege tanks and well-rounded armies, that's what I've seen so far.

EDIT2: Something is weird, that one bot has "Our vs enemy supply" but how does it obtain the number of enemy supply when everything is in the fog of war? Is it getting the number out of the game memory? Is that allowed?

Nope, that's not allowed. I guess it's just the supply of enemy units it has seen so far. There's only one thing that bots have access to and humans don't - unique Unit IDs. Nut that doesn't help much.

Why not? Thats what the actual StarCraft AI did above a certain level. They also get extra resources per pull if you set it high enough.

The point is to make good AI to play within the rules of the game. It's a lot more difficult than giving the AI advantages over the human player.

If the AI could cheat you could just make a dumb AI that gets infinite resources that would be impossible to beat.

I would think the goal is to create human-like AI, not cheating AI that exists solely to challenge strong players.

Cheating is not allowed actually.. and API doesn't give you the information it shouldn't. The goal is creating a strong AI players (not necessarily human-like) that win without cheating.

I can wholeheartedly recommend participating in this tournament as a student. I built a bot for BWAPI a few years back and it taught me a great deal about programming in hostile environments against unreliable API's and with unreliable resources.

And that's all before you even get to true AI. You can skip all that and just cut to the AI part by choosing to base your bot on one of the existing open source AI's that are already available and continuously improved by the community.

As someone who lost his entire high school life to Starcraft...

this looks like fun.

So how would these AIs stack up against professional StarCraft players?

They (the AIs) would get completely stomped. As far as I know there isn't an AI that comes even close.

Some of the bots played a bit on ICCup around ranks C-D or so. They still lose to professionals at this time.

Their micromanagement skills are unmatched but high-level strategy is very poor compared to professional players.

Good micro with bad macro is far worse than the reverse. They would get stomped.

Why not use pro players' games and use that as a training set to train a machine learning model?

I'm sure you could but what if the human player plays an unseen yet still good strategy? There are an infinite number of strategies and a constantly changing metagame.

I think a better AI would be something that could generate good strategies itself.

After watching a few games on the stream it seems like most are seriously lacking in scouting, often not finding the enemy's base until the final battle.

So much cheese... but still impressive! I can't wait to see them get closer and closer to pro level.

This is great. What other games can I play by legally modifying code to change the way my player acts? One example that comes to mind is http://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/

http://www.codingame.com/contests

I am delighted to see competitions are still being arranged with BWAPI. A few years ago I was meaning to participate in the AIIDE competition but didn't manage to cut out enough spare time to finish then. Looks like there's still new chances.

How do you make use of the stream if it doesn't show any gameplay?

Is the stream only managed from time to time?

I caught it playing with over 130 live watchers for a few minutes half an hour ago, until it stopped streaming and crashed.

It's restarted after every 10 games and does offline for like 2 minutes intentionally. Btw, it had 270 viewers few minutes ago - that's the most viewed Brood War steram on TeamLiquid and most viewed of all the streams on HitBox.tv ;)

Any chance some participant will release the source code afterwards?

Under "Downloads & Links" see "List of Open-source Bots" (A list of bots that can be downloaded and played against. Please add your bot here if you don't mind sharing its code.)

looks like mostly slovak and czech competition :)

There's several U.S. universities represented, at least one Dutch and I also see some cities in Germany, Austria and Denmark.

But yeah, the guy who started it is from there so obviously he has an easier time marketing it to nearby universities.

awesome. something to put on my second screen at work =D

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