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A programmer friend of mine kindly left this on my Facebook wall this morning:
The Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz will be hosting a StarCraft competition at AIIDE 2010:
The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust commercial RTS environment.
The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top performing bots.
I'm curious as to who the "skilled human players" will be. Maybe it's...
Registration seems to be open until next September, so it'll probably be a while until AIIDE 2010 actually takes place. Just thought some people who like SC and programming would be interested - although it's kind of unclear as to who can participate ("participants" lists a few schools, so it might be exclusive to those schools only).
Tournament 1: Micro-management (small groups of units on flat terrains)
Tournament 2: Small-scale Combat (Stage 1 + Interesting terrain)
Tournament 3: Tech-limited game (StarCraft minus some of the more complex tech)
Tournament 4: Complete StarCraft game
EDIT: The competition's also been slashdotted, where it's being discussed by various people who don't know too much:
Perhaps a game not so dominated by rushing tactics would be a better choice of base game? It definitely seems an interesting idea, but there must be games better suited to an AI contest like this...
lol.
Source
Tournament rules
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there's a thread on this in the general forum already...
but still i must say, fascinating that they took up SC as the subject
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Actually this thread contains more details... the other post should copy them before this gets closed
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Correct forum + better OP = winner
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This is pretty cool. It would be nice to see some experienced programmers enter the community of AI programming to bring out the potential of BWAPI which these guys have been working on for a very long time.
But make no mistake, creating an AI like this is not something you'll pull out of a hat within a couple of months. This will be a tremendous workload and an incredible challenge.
A semi-similar project I beta tested for Dawn of War, called Dawn of Skirmish, introduced things like advanced dancing and better pathing and stuff like that. Not nearly as complicated as this, and that was in Lua. It was created by a strong team of programmers, and it took them years to reach what they have now.
But you could always create an AI aimed for a very specific bracket, like the micro challenge, which would be a lot easier than trying to make an all-around AI.
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Holy crap, we finally get to see a bisu bot!
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I'm really not sure about the AI community for SC and how active it has been in the times since the game was initially released. There are other RTS games that I know have extensive AI-building communities that I have always considered dope as fuck. I'm really pleased to see this announcement and I'm interested to hear what comes of it.
Has there been an AI developing community surrounding StarCraft since its release? Is making AIs easy (like it is in AoK for example)? I really hadn't thought too much about SC AI because I have treated the game more seriously competitive than other games in the genre, which of course it is.
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They better not pick some D- noob as the 'skilled human' player.
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On November 13 2009 07:37 Jyvblamo wrote:
They better not pick some D- noob as the 'skilled human' player.
Ugh, I have a bad feeling about this lol. Reminds me of someone who wrote an "article" about an AI competition by using an FFA on BGH or something like that. 
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Baa?21247 Posts
Just have the comp 5 pool :D
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The comp should be able to BM the player when it starts losing. Then you can truly have the online experience offline.
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This competition is a little unfair isn't it?
To make a good AI for starcraft you would need to know build orders for each match up.
scout and detect what your opponent is making. Then play accordingly to what your opponent is doing.
This requires you to be at least D+ just to make good AI for starcraft.
So the people who play SC competitively have an advantage.
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Actually,
Bad mannered in game behavior is discouraged, but not forbidden
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On November 13 2009 08:02 hazelynut wrote:Actually,
Hahaha, that's awesome. Wish my school's AI contests used SC. t_t
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What maps are being used for the complete games? I don't know much about AIs, but wouldn't the fact that the games are played on 1 map make it much easier to program?
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On November 13 2009 08:08 thunk wrote:
What maps are being used for the complete games? I don't know much about AIs, but wouldn't the fact that the games are played on 1 map make it much easier to program?
Check out the info of the tournament sections. They contain the map pools.
For the full games, they're Bo5 and the maps are supposedly,
* Python
* Andromeda
* Destination
* Tau Cross
* Heartbreak Ridge
http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftTournament4
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Cool. I haven't made use of my AI degree since I graduated. This would have been great motivation.
What's the prize for winning?
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United States3824 Posts
There's no prize for winning the tourny at least.
I was thinking of getting into this. I was looking at the API and you can assign orders to individual units really easily. Instant mine killing DTs and pefect Vulture Micro sounds pretty sweet.
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From the rules:
Bad mannered in game behavior is discouraged, but not forbidden
A bad mannered AI? Someone needs to get on that right away...
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i453.photobucket.com/albums/qq251/hazelynut/AIIDESCPoster.png)
