2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

Would be interesting to get your hands on a large set of replays from a lot of gosu players and run some machine learning offline prior to each map for the current match map.

Would be fun to experiment with the data and see if it would be possible to infer game tactics from professional players and "simulate" those against another bot based on the current game state.

While I was watching some of these replays, I was thinking to myself of all the things a bot needs to keep track of and all the things it could potentially try, and it just seemed so overwhelming. There are just too many things you can try, and your resources are limited.

StarCraft is a very, very deep game. It seems like it would be very easy to waste time on paths that lead to no real gains. And that rather than using interesting AI techniques, the most important thing might in fact be the StarCraft knowledge of the author. And how good they are at distilling the game down to the parts that is going to yield the biggest returns.

Also, StarCraft has very distinct early, mid, and late stages to the game. Focusing only on the early game, and going with a single strategy eliminates a ton of complexity. If you spend all your time on getting an all-or-nothing rush perfected, you've essentially "skipped" all the sophisticated techniques some of the other authors spent their time creating for the mid and late stages. In fact, it seems like some authors did just this and were quite successful.

But even an all-or-nothing rush has a surprising amount of depth, and perfecting that would be a quite a feat. The biggest thing being micromanagement/unit control and knowing what to target first (this is actually very hard). If you don't perfect that, beating a pro doesn't seem like it would be even remotely possible.

I was a huge StarCraft BW fan, and it's the only game where I got to the point where I could sometimes hold my own against pro players. I'm tempted to try BWAPI. Creating a full bot seems like a huge amount of work that I probably don't have time for, but creating a unit control AI sounds like it would be fun. I remember there used to be micromanagement custom game maps that people used to create (basically a series of situational challenges where you have a bunch of units and you could face other human players 1v1). Doing a competition for that as well would be pretty cool I think.

This couldn't be more wrong. The amount of glitches in BW that allow got micro potential is huge. It's actually one of the biggest complaints from BW players about SC2, the lack of available micro. Check out th video "Depth of Micro" by Lalush for more info on things like muta stacking, patrol micro, carrier leash range, and tons of other hidden micro.

You are also wrong about your last statement, the limiting factor for zerg that's you're talking about it APM which is pretty much unlimited for a bot. Injects can be automated without taking any attention from anything else.

The custom map is called MicroTournament10.6 . If you want to try to focus only on micromanagement, that map is perfect for it.

If you want I can give you my micro bot for that map as a benchmark to compete against.

This is great, thanks! The fact that it's possible to get started in Clojure, I no longer have any excuses to not try this.

Having an interactive REPL seems like it would be helpful for iterating on micro routines (this is what I want to focus on). I see you already have some situational micro examples too.

I feel like a kid again. Can't wait to try this! Now I'm wishing I still had my StarCraft discs with me.