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2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

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Re: 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

#21

Post by LetaBot »

solicode wrote: post #20
LetaBot wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Awesome, that would be great. Thanks! I see you even hosted a micro tournament recently. I didn't know that was a thing. How did it go? So there's at least some interest for that it seems? If so, I think I'd like to give it a shot too in the future (it'll probably be a while before I can get to this though).

My micro bot is basically generating heuristics in the form of if/then statements and testing them in against itself playing the other side. It already has found hit&run on 1 level on its own, but it still isn't good enough vs human players.

Contact me on TeamLiquid for the bot + code and for any future micro tournaments: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/profile.php?user=LetaBot

Re: 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

#22

Post by LetaBot »

solicode wrote: post #19
omni wrote: post #16

For anyone who thinks this looks fun but isn't a huge fan of C++ or Java, I made a Clojure API that wraps the Java version. https://github.com/thieman/korhal Previous HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7050325

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.

If you (or your bot) play on the private server ICCUP, you don't need the disks. Just download the ICCUP version from: http://iccup.com/en/starcraft/sc_start.html

Re: 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

#23

Post by Malician »

Havoc wrote: post #9

Surprisingly high number of "Random Race" bots. I'd have thought that gives a fairly limited advantage against an AI while being a significant disadvantage in the programming side (i.e. AI needs to be good at 3 things).

Knowing what race you are facing allows you to pick a build which is defensible against the greatest number of early strategies common to that race (you know if you might get hit with six pool, 4 gate, or bunker rush.)

It's relatively easy to program a version of all these basic builds for each race into the AI. It's practically impossible to configure an AI so that it can scout all possible common early builds for 3 different races and respond properly to each one. Even a human has no single build that works against everything, and will go into really really strange improvised responses when they get hit by something unexpected.

Re: 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

#24

Post by xanderjanz »

narsil wrote: post #4

The faq links for each bot are interesting. The author of the bot ranked first (Tscmoo) doesn't think the bot uses any interesting AI techniques or algorithms: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23817376/Starcraft/AIIDE... > My bot has a variety of different strategies that it can execute. The strategy to execute is chosen randomly using weights, and the weights are adjusted based on previous match results. It's pre…

Developer set parametres are pretty common in industry "machine learning", the kind of thing Google NEtflix and Amazon use. Academic models aim to reduce the amount of human input, but most real world applications have no such motivation. This kind of AI can be seen as a developer parenting a machine.

Re: 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

#25

Post by omni »

solicode wrote: post #19
omni wrote: post #16

For anyone who thinks this looks fun but isn't a huge fan of C++ or Java, I made a Clojure API that wraps the Java version. https://github.com/thieman/korhal Previous HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7050325

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.

It has REPL support built in. :) https://github.com/thieman/korhal/wiki/Using-the-REPL

Re: 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

#26

Post by PeCaN »

llasram wrote: post #7
narsil wrote: post #4

The faq links for each bot are interesting. The author of the bot ranked first (Tscmoo) doesn't think the bot uses any interesting AI techniques or algorithms: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23817376/Starcraft/AIIDE... > My bot has a variety of different strategies that it can execute. The strategy to execute is chosen randomly using weights, and the weights are adjusted based on previous match results. It's pre…

I'd noticed too that the winner claimed to use just a variety of hand-rolled strategies, and wonder why that is. Has anyone had the time to dig into the code? Is this a case of well-writen "naive" code trumping theoretically-better but poorly-implemented algorithms, or are there properties of the game state-space which make e.g. Monte Carlo tree search perform poorly?

Speculation: the winning author is simply good at StarCraft and knew what to implement. His implementation was probably simple but did one thing very well, which beat more complicated/smart AI implementations from worse players.

Monte Carlo over the StarCraft state-space would be very hard to implement but I don't see any particular reason why it wouldn't work decently well.

Re: 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

#27

Post by solicode »

omni wrote: post #25
solicode wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has REPL support built in. :) https://github.com/thieman/korhal/wiki/Using-the-REPL

Yeah, I saw that. :) This is impressive. I wish I knew about this project sooner. I didn't see this project on the Clojure subreddit, so I shared it there in case others haven't seen it before either.

I see the issue you created about separating the Clojure API from the AI code. I think I'd have to do that because I'll be creating an AI from scratch.

I noticed in the thread you linked to that you mentioned Java packaging and possibilities for contributions. I might be able to help there. Let me know, or if you want to create some GitHub issues, I can take a look later and see which ones I can take.

Re: 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

#28

Post by Havoc »

Malician wrote: post #23
Havoc wrote: post #9

Surprisingly high number of "Random Race" bots. I'd have thought that gives a fairly limited advantage against an AI while being a significant disadvantage in the programming side (i.e. AI needs to be good at 3 things).

Knowing what race you are facing allows you to pick a build which is defensible against the greatest number of early strategies common to that race (you know if you might get hit with six pool, 4 gate, or bunker rush.) It's relatively easy to program a version of all these basic builds for each race into the AI. It's practically impossible to configure an AI so that it can scout all possible common early builds for 3…

I get the basic logic of using random. I just doubt it translates well to AI.

As you say "practically impossible to configure an AI so that it can scout all possible common early builds" so an AI is essentially flying blind anyway. Hence no advantage in picking random just more things to worry about.

Re: 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

#29

Post by Michael_s45543 »

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Re: 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

#30

Post by Malician »

Havoc wrote: post #28
Malician wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing what race you are facing allows you to pick a build which is defensible against the greatest number of early strategies common to that race (you know if you might get hit with six pool, 4 gate, or bunker rush.) It's relatively easy to program a version of all these basic builds for each race into the AI. It's practically impossible to configure an AI so that it can scout all possible common early builds for 3…

I get the basic logic of using random. I just doubt it translates well to AI. As you say "practically impossible to configure an AI so that it can scout all possible common early builds" so an AI is essentially flying blind anyway. Hence no advantage in picking random just more things to worry about.

"It's really hard" does not lead to "so there's no point trying."

Facing 1/3 the builds increases your success rate drastically.

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