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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/wH2KQx2.png) Hosted by Czech Technical University, Prague & Comenius University, Bratislava
About the SSCAI Tournament
The Student Starcraft AI Tournament is a tournament for artificial intelligence students who have coded bots in java or c++. Although one of the goals is to win, it is not the only one. AI is a rather broad field, so there are a lot of different implementations, among them neural nets, combat simulators, learning programs, but also fixed strategies and cheeses.
'breakk' has been the mastermind or this fantastic tournament, which sports a line-up of 42 students or teams with their AIs, duking it out in a 42x42 grid for the round robin stage. If you're worrying that this poor man has set up 861 ((42x41)/2) games, rest assured that all sessions were made by another piece of software. The lot has been broadcasted automatically over the last couple of days via http://www.hitbox.tv/sscaitournament. I've been blogging some battle reports here, if you want to have a look at the matches. Replays will be released on the website soon. The tournament stream is broadcasting random matches now, look there too.
Martin Rooijackers' LetaBot, a rather cheesy bunker rush-bot, took a joint first place with XIMP, Tomas Vajda's creation, that likes to cannon itself in and subsequently send carriers over to kill the competition. Rooijackers thereby wins the student competition, as Vajda is not competing as student. Congratulations Martin!
Third place is occupied by the indubitably frightening ICELab bot. If I had to pick a bot that would be most challenging and fun to play as a human player, it would be this one. The ICE-Lab, at Ritsumeikan University seems to be on top of its game, which is AI and incorporating gosu scientifix stuff in a starcraft bot.
There are (too) many terran and protoss in the top 8, as you can see. Marek Suppa went 30-11, finished 9th with his 5pool bot. That's right, a 5 pool bot. Prognostications made in #bwapi on sunday pointed the way to a sauron-zerg or defiler-bot, unlimited apm and other AIs being unable to handle that, but more about that later.
Top AI 8 Tournament
'breakk' will be hosting a top 8 conference shortly, most likely around next week. Want to see the round robin champions duke it out in a yet to be determined but unmentionably glorious format? Will LetaBot be able to cheese its way to another title? Can XIMP carrier-own the terran competition? Or wil ICELab take the throne? Watch it! Tournament organisation is looking for a caster!
Participating next year?
An AI-programmer, wouldn't you want to be one? On birthday parties, blind dates: "Oh I'm flipping burgers atm because I can't be bothered to write resumes, but in my spare time I code neural net learning stuff into VR combat simulations-" It is within everyone's grasp!
Check THIS, the SSCAI tutorial database. Many bots are open source, so just download a couple, look what it's all about and modify your heart out. BWAPI has been praised as one of the best, if not the best open source instruction kit for a game. Also look in the contact and further reading bits below. #bwapi is full of very talented and friendly people, ready to help you, but prepare for some hard labour along the way to your first own AI!
Further reading
Contact SSCAI
http://sscaitournament.com/
BWAPI facebook
chat: irc.freenode.net #bwapi
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A very nice and concise resume of all the action. Thanks!
Let's really hope that such reports are going to increase the BWAPI AI community or at least the fan base!
Maybe the following famous and commercial Broodwar tournaments will be between pro-grammers instead of pro-gamers. 
Looking forward to the top 8, single-elimination bracket next week and to the replay pack of the already past tournament, of course.
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I am going to run some Bot vs itself matches (for example: ICELab vs ICElab) for those that are interested. I do not have access to all the DLL's of the top 8 bots, but I will try to do as many as possible. Replays will be posted here and in the SSCAI tournament topic.
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France9034 Posts
Congratz to all the bot creators who participated!
I'm surprised Zerg is so badly represented in this tournament. When I read about the Berkeley overmind, it seemed to be a very interesting AI with its mutalisk-centered approach. Anyone could explain then why is there such a strong performance by Terran and Protoss AIs compared to Zerg ones?
Damn, this makes me want to fiddle a bit with the BWAPI. 
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Fantastic stuff!
Love to see people use BWAPI and BW
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Good luck and when you are bored or have to work do like me watch some games <3 it runs good and its HD , i always watch at work :D great games
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Hello, breakk here (aka. Michal Certicky) with a couple of notes
Thanks!
First of all, big thanks to everyone for participating, watching the games or writing about SSCAI here on TL or anywhere else! I really love to see the bots getting better every year and the tournament getting the attention. Makes all the work put into it worthwhile.
Students & non-students
Little note: The tournament is not just for the students! It was in 2011, but now there are many non-students and teams there. Anyone can join.
Game management software
OP mentioned there is a piece of software used to schedule and run the games automatically. We now indeed use the modified version of this (thanks to people at University of Alberta), but we actually scheduled and ran hundreds of games manually back in 2011.
WANTED: Casters for Ro8
Yes, we are indeed looking for volunteers to record a commentary of upcoming single-elimination bracket of top 8 bots. It will be published on SSCAI YouTube channel. English as native language or in-depth knowledge of BW is NOT NEEDED. Please let me know if you're interested (either in comments, PM or, preferably, email me at certicky@gmail.com).
WANTED: New members for SSCAI organization team
We're also looking for people to join the SSCAI organization team. You all can help in any of the following ways:
* by making noise about SSCAI: blogging, spamming social media, recording YouTube videos or any other kind of marketing
* by programming parts of the website or tournament management software
* by occassionally moderating the chat on hitbox.tv stream
* by coming up with good ideas and reporting the issues
Let me know if you're interested (certicky@gmail.com, PM or comment here). I'll soon create a page on the SSCAI web that will give everyone a proper credit (might be helpful to you as well).
Reading
If you just want to read more about the bot-coding, BWAPI and game AI, take a look either at this collection of related scientific papers or (for lighter reading) check out the short articles on Kotaku or RPS.
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TLADT24920 Posts
Looks great and I loved your mini-BRs in the blog nepeta!
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Bisutopia19372 Posts
If I can cast from vods and they will be available next week, ill try and get to it. (I didn't see a date above for ro8). I used to tinker with the BW api from a couple years ago. I am curious to see how much it's improved.
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France9034 Posts
Hehe, many in this list are from a friend. (Most of the bayesian-centered papers)
Definitely good reads, even when reading "scientific materials" is painful to you.
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On January 19 2015 18:26 Ragnarork wrote:Hehe, many in this list are from a friend. (Most of the bayesian-centered papers) Definitely good reads, even when reading "scientific materials" is painful to you.
I guess you mean Gabriel Synnaeve, right? Met him at a conference once Gabriel, are you reading this? How's the work on that new clojure bot going?
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France9034 Posts
Yup exactly!
By the way, I like how the only bot (obviously) named after a progamer ended up first 
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this was a broodwar tournament, or sc2?
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On January 20 2015 03:28 hypnotoad.410 wrote:
this was a broodwar tournament, or sc2?
brood war. and it's still running (check the stream) even though this one phase is over.
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Tomorrow (Wednesday, 01/21/2015) at 23:00 CET / 16:00 CST, we'll stream first 4 games of SSCAI mixed division bracket. You can vote for the lineup in BWAPI Facebook group.
First one is arranged according to round-robin scores, next two are random:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/dFSxhuX.png)
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Last year I run Krasi0bot at iCCup and damn, he can beat D- and sometimes D players. Actually, that bot needs to be improved a lot, but he is cool. What I am upset that I couldn't find any download links for other bots. Students hide them because they afraid that someone can stole it? It would be fun to play against these bots too, but from what I hear you need two PC's for it. Hoping for release of BWAPI 4.0 which will enable this function and new stuffs. Keep up great work!
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On January 20 2015 21:43 outscar wrote:
Last year I run Krasi0bot at iCCup and damn, he can beat D- and sometimes D players. Actually, that bot needs to be improved a lot, but he is cool. What I am upset that I couldn't find any download links for other bots. Students hide them because they afraid that someone can stole it? It would be fun to play against these bots too, but from what I hear you need two PC's for it. Hoping for release of BWAPI 4.0 which will enable this function and new stuffs. Keep up great work!
You can find some of the other bots at the AIIDE download page here. Playing against these bots can be done on one PC with a virtual machine.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/TuTpLIX.png)
