Hi Guys, I'm one of the organizers of the upcoming Starcraft AI Competition. This year's tournament is being run at the University of Alberta and will again use Broodwar.
This is the 2nd annual running of this competition, and will have a maximum of 30 teams. It was announced around 6 months ago, and submissions have finally started rolling in. I will be maintaining this thread for those who are interested in seeing what the state of the art in computer Starcraft AI is doing.
Some quick notes about the tournament for those who don't visit the website:
- Maximum of 30 teams - Round robin tournament - Each game has 1 hour time limit, with Starcraft score used at that point to determine the winner (to avoid situations where bots break and games don't end) - Games will be run on 40 machines simultaneously to get as many relevant results as possible
Here is a video of our current tournament set-up, using automatic game scheduling software to play the maximum number of games:
We will be keeping a page online showing the progress of the tournament as games are played, however specific results of the games will be kept secret until the tournament is over.
Any questions or comments about the tournament are welcome!
Would be cool if you could post the replays and have someone cast them (maybe you can ask Sayle if he is willing and able), or send us some of the games casted. These are always fun to watch, as each year the bots get a little trickier.
Looks pretty cool - It would be nice to pick a couple of good games - if there's any - and get them casted for people to see just how advanced (or not) bots are right now.
Nice stuff. Btw - why are you not releasing the results until after the tournament completes? You fear sabotage or hacking or...?
On August 08 2011 10:54 Essbee wrote: Wow this is really amazing. I showed this to a friend, he found it really great too O_O
Edit: Just a quick question: In which language these bots are made? C++?
The bots can be written in any language, but the main API is in C++. The two main ways of creating a bot are:
1) Write a native bot completely in C++ which is then injected into StarCraft using Chaoslauncher 2) Write a 'proxy bot' in a language which talks to StarCraft via memory sharing or sockets
I think you need to do 2 things. One is make it easy for players to play against these bots on 1 computer. Two would be some articles and hype like videos casts and things like that. having the bots all open source means someone can pick up with a real bot instead of having to start all over.
Is there any way to download some bots (like Berkley's overmind for example)? I'd really like to play against them and compare with the BWAPI ones. I've watched some videos on ucscbwebber's youtube channel and it appeared to me that a bot written "from scratch" performed only comparable (if not worse) to the unidimensional build-order-script oriented non-cheating BWAPI bots (raynor, panda, etc).
So i get it this tournament is to attract people who wanted to give them selves a shot in AI programming is this for those who are experience only or for the beginners too ?
Well if it helps I'll volunteer to cast some shit^^
AH I always love these bot competitions, mainly because they have the potential to show us the best MnM micro that has ever been seen. Y U NO MAKE Marines micro? screw mutas, screw dragoons, move dem marines back 'n forth individually and you win EZ!
On August 10 2011 19:34 Holy Check wrote: Is there any way to download some bots (like Berkley's overmind for example)? I'd really like to play against them and compare with the BWAPI ones. I've watched some videos on ucscbwebber's youtube channel and it appeared to me that a bot written "from scratch" performed only comparable (if not worse) to the unidimensional build-order-script oriented non-cheating BWAPI bots (raynor, panda, etc).
I think they perform better than the non-cheating BWAPI bots based on what I see so far on videos of these stuff.
On August 10 2011 21:44 bITt.mAN wrote: Well if it helps I'll volunteer to cast some shit^^
AH I always love these bot competitions, mainly because they have the potential to show us the best MnM micro that has ever been seen. Y U NO MAKE Marines micro? screw mutas, screw dragoons, move dem marines back 'n forth individually and you win EZ!
I believe MUTAR is the way to go when talking 1000 - 2000 APMs. If you allow a bot to get a decent amount of mutas he will rape you sideways. I believe this was the principle behind the Overmind bot.
I think that given enough time and effort, a BW bot will beat top progamers. If for example the BW departments of a few universities work together, I'm sure we'll see a B level bot pretty soon raping shit on ICCUP.
And you are seriously underestimating programmers. See what I did there?
Just by harassing multiple places at once, a computer can demolish a human player. Not to mention imbalanced muta micro, 10000 consume-plague-swarm combos at the same time, perfect macro, etc.
Sure, a human has the edge in the early game, a better grasp of strategy and better all-round decision making. And a computer can't match that. But that's thinking through the perspective of a human's style of play, since a computer-oriented style would definitely focus on mechanics and use extra-safe builds.
Plus the whole BW programming scene has been around for just a couple of years. Unlike chess for example, it hasn't benefited from the expertise of big companies, experienced programmers (no offense to university students) and expert gamers. But despite all this, Berkley's Overmind can beat a C- player.
If a handful of students from a handful of universities managed to make an AI that is much better than the Blizzard one in just a couple of years, WHILE having to struggle with the internals (the API), I don't see why we won't have a capable BOT in another couple of years.
I'm sure people had this exact same discussion back in '95 when talking about chess. Sure, chess and Starcraft are quite different, but at that time a supercomputer was as powerful as a Pentium 4 and it was facing a world champion.
EPT
