21–30 of 51 posts
It's unfortunate that the only other comments so far are about the fact this article is a few years old. Clearly what's interesting here is the method itself, not its immediate impact on the StarCraft II metagame. Real-time strategy games have recently stimulated a lot of great research [1] because they exhibit several interesting subproblems such as resource allocation optimization, strategy selection, or plan optim…
That being said there's usually better local/heuristic search methods (eventhough they are also often quite a bit harder to understand unless you just want to use them).
I enjoy genetic algorithms conceptually and they were one of my biggest "lightbulb moment" during university...a little silly thinking back but the order of classes was lined up in a way where I didn't really know much about algorithms and had just learned JAVA basics and naively assumed "computers are powerful...I can brute force everything" and then took a class called "soft computing" (iirc) and we had to solve so…
I used that strategy a few times when it came out. I found it interesting to see how fast humans could responded and nullify the advantage. I think after 3-4 wins with the strategy I started getting countered effectively. So it took a few days and all the players at my level knew about it and could handle it easily. It's hard to beat a general purpose strong AI in the long run!
I enjoy genetic algorithms conceptually and they were one of my biggest "lightbulb moment" during university...a little silly thinking back but the order of classes was lined up in a way where I didn't really know much about algorithms and had just learned JAVA basics and naively assumed "computers are powerful...I can brute force everything" and then took a class called "soft computing" (iirc) and we had to solve so…
Hill climbing is far simpler and virtually always works better. In fact I've yet to see a practical case where GAs work better than simple randomized hill climbing.
I'm not a java programmer and currently eclipse is telling me that it's going to take 60 minutes to download. How does the program itself work? Is there some SC2 API they are using for this or did they just write down all the values and are "simulating" a SC2 build.
http://www.sc2planner.com/#Zaaaap8oDaCoDjp3oFaaaaaoDaahcjoHj...
And just for fun, a more optimized version using a 13 pool in place of the 11 overpool to get the seventh roach 4 seconds earlier:
http://www.sc2planner.com/#ZaaajaaaaoFaaaoDaacjhoHjflllllll
If you're looking for a current GA build order optimizer, SCFusion is probably the best one: https://github.com/Carbon-12/SCFusion
I'm not a java programmer and currently eclipse is telling me that it's going to take 60 minutes to download. How does the program itself work? Is there some SC2 API they are using for this or did they just write down all the values and are "simulating" a SC2 build.
It's a simulation - if you ignore your opponent and assume perfect execution, the result of build orders is deterministic within pretty close bounds. There are a number of tools around to do this, here is an online version showing the build order mentioned in the article: http://www.sc2planner.com/#Zaaaap8oDaCoDjp3oFaaaaaoDaahcjoHj... And just for fun, a more optimized version using a 13 pool in place of the 11 overp…
I'm not a java programmer and currently eclipse is telling me that it's going to take 60 minutes to download. How does the program itself work? Is there some SC2 API they are using for this or did they just write down all the values and are "simulating" a SC2 build.
I used that strategy a few times when it came out. I found it interesting to see how fast humans could responded and nullify the advantage. I think after 3-4 wins with the strategy I started getting countered effectively. So it took a few days and all the players at my level knew about it and could handle it easily. It's hard to beat a general purpose strong AI in the long run!
I used this as my main build for quite a while, and got pretty good at transitioning out of it. Kept me in platinum league pretty solidly. Not sure if you were diamond or masters, though.
I'm not a java programmer and currently eclipse is telling me that it's going to take 60 minutes to download. How does the program itself work? Is there some SC2 API they are using for this or did they just write down all the values and are "simulating" a SC2 build.
Having built a quite advanced GA based build order calculator myself, I can say that it involved a lot of analyzing the game, followed by recreating parts of the game engine that touch construction/advancement/worker movement.
I made a Tic-Tac-Toe GA in undergrad as my senior project. It was horribly stupid, but I didn't reduce the problem space down, and I could have easily implemented rotation and flip mapping to reduce the search space by a significant amount (just over 7% of the nieve search space), but the algorithm still worked pretty well and served as a great learning experience.
The genetic part is ridiculously simple, IMO. The hard part is figuring out how to define the rules of the game, break them out, and figure out what maps to the genome and how it maps. Evolution from that point is simply modifying the genome in different ways.