Starcraft AI competition

http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~bweber/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=starcraft_aiide_2010

by chasingsparks • 17 years ago

120 54 17 years ago

users.soe.ucsc.edu

This is a cross-post from Slashdot. Nonetheless, this is VERY cool. For those of you who missed the very interesting Mario competition, you have a while on this one.

Dilpil• 17 years ago

Speaking of the mario competition, is there a way to watch videos of submissions?

GavinB• 17 years ago

Here's one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8

Impressive stuff. Others in the video responses below.

rictic• 17 years ago

You can run Team Proggit's bot locally pretty easily (one click if java is working right): http://rictic.com/marioai/

Tichy6• 17 years ago

Would love to compete, but the required investment of time seems potentially enourmous.

mquander• 17 years ago

Well, you know, it would probably be an enormous investment to get a general-purpose bot that could win the tournament, but you could write a simple bot with simple strategies pretty quickly (assuming that the API is sane.) For example, you could write a bot that always executes the same kind of rush right away, or one that just tries to expand absolutely everywhere on the map as fast as it can until it has X supply of workers. That's both fun and a great addition to the competition since it diversifies the ecosystem that the serious bots have to deal with.

bweber5• 17 years ago

There are different tournaments for participants that want to focus on only a subset of the game. For example, you could hard code all locations for the tournament 3 contest and focus on macro.

bweber5• 17 years ago

The Mario competition was held at the CIG 2009 conference. There has been talk of holding a StarCraft competition at CIG 2010. http://www.ieee-cig.org/

roundsquare4• 17 years ago

This is a cross-post from Slashdot.

Is this taboo?

chasingsparks4• 17 years ago

I wasn't sure. I assumed that most people on here check both websites therefore it was redundent. However, speaking from experience, I don't see the point in commenting on a Slashdot thread, so I guess there's no reason for this to be a taboo.

GrandMasterBirt• 17 years ago

MMMM sounds cool. Would be nice to practice against some challenging AIs vs the crappy one provided by SC that cheats to win :P Specially without perfect awareness.

Would be awesome if the AIs had a difficulty tweak that allowed them to be used in actual SC games :)

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

Dreaming about this kind of thing is one reason I went into computer science.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

Keep those dreams alive! I'm sure one day you'll be in a position to make it happen.

tayssir• 17 years ago

I often wished that I had a cyborg-mode: gaming with a very programmable interface. (With basically something like Emacs and a REPL.) I could teach the computer new things as I explored, and eventually start to play in a very high-level way.

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

A friend worked on a gaming company where you train an algorithm to play a fighter in a mortal combat style game. The way you train it is by playing against it. Then you release it into the wild to fight other AIs using your style. When it came back, it was better than you, but not for long.

Product didn't go anywhere, but the architecture could easily be copied. It would be ridiculously cool to build this into Star Craft. There would be so many more people exposed to the AIs if all the knowledge needed to "program" them was in the game play itself.

chasingsparks4• 17 years ago

I have not yet fully read the API. This is an unfounded idea but I am curious: if we could hack it so that developers could shoot it out over the internet prior to the combination, would anyone want a HN league?

eslifka3• 17 years ago

I think this is a great idea. I haven't read more than the description page yet, so i don't know if it's possible either, but I think that if it is possible then that would be a great way to iteratively test production. I also wonder if it will be possible to play against your bot early on. They mention in the description that they'll have top players playing the bots at the tournaments, but I wonder if it's easy to get that set up at home. I should think so, but you never know. If it is easy it would be rather fun to play your own bot.

onewland• 17 years ago

This would interest me.

bweber5• 17 years ago

While you can't run the Broodwar API on battle.net, it is possible to run bots on ICCup. But dont expect anybody to join the game, since you will not be running the antihack.

tgittos2• 17 years ago

I'd definitely be interested.

astine• 17 years ago

I'd be interested.

natmaster• 17 years ago

Oh definitely. More opponents to train against.

tibbon2• 17 years ago

Wonder how it fares against the standard Starcraft AI?

eslifka3• 17 years ago

The standard starcraft AI was always pretty pathetic, even after Blizzard's attempts to make it more challenging. My guess is that in the subset competitions (1 - 3) the sc AI would get whipped, if it could even be coerced into competing. (I don't think it could even do the micromanaging competition, I think the units would just sit there until they were attacked. And even then it would be the standard unit ai responding instead of the overall ai. It might fair a little better in the tech limited tournament.) I think the limited scope of those tournaments will allow the submitted bots to be highly optimized. It might fare better in the overall competition though, since both sides will be dealing with the full complexity of the game. But I still think that by the tournament the submitted bots will be highly superior to the built in ai.

tibbon2• 17 years ago

Wasn't part of the Warcraft and Starcraft bot's technique that they cheated effectively and often knew things that a player couldn't have known (and executed on things that a player couldn't have?) in order to stand any chance at winning?

MikeCapone• 17 years ago

I'd love to see some videos of these AIs playing against one another, especially if there was a really widescreen video that could show a split screen of what both AIs are doing at the same time.

bweber5• 17 years ago

All of the replay files will be made publicly available after the competition, see the rules page.

perplexes• 17 years ago

The link looks broken. :/

chasingsparks4• 17 years ago

I guess the defense against slash-dotting could not be sustained.

bweber5• 17 years ago

The site has been transferred to a new sub-domain to handle the traffic

Tichy6• 17 years ago

What has become of the Starcraft lectures, are there transcripts yet? I suppose they would be mandatory viewing for coming up with a decent strategy...

http://academicearth.org/lectures/introduction-starcraft

ShardPhoenix• 17 years ago

I don't know about transcripts, but there are some pretty detailed summaries (minus the mathematical derivations) available here: http://www.sirlin.net/blog/category/starcraft-class

csallen2• 17 years ago

This video is great, I wasn't aware something like this existed. Thanks for posting the link.

varaon• 17 years ago

http://www.broodwarai.com/index.php

kentosi• 17 years ago

On the one hand I'm surprised people are still playing this game. Then again, given how long Starcraft II has been taking to come out, I guess these guys have no choice but to enjoy what they have.

(PS - I'm not flaming them. I was an SC addict about 8 years ago untill WOW came out and everyone seemed to have lost interest.)

csallen2• 17 years ago

While we're talking about StarCraft, I'm on the MIT team and we're hosting an exhibition match against Caltech on Saturday. It'll be streaming if you want to watch: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=105...

metaguri• 17 years ago

Wow, this looks awesome. Even if I don't make it into the competition, I'd love to play with the APIs.

I've always wanted to get into RTS games but I am just not very good at the mouse--I always get bogged down by failing to click on the right units and issue the right commands at the right times, and I've fond that once you make a few mistakes you usually don't recover, or you are back to square one.

Board games and turn-based games don't share this problem of course, but they aren't quite the adrenaline pumpers either... not worse, just different :-)

FooBarWidget2• 17 years ago

How is this possible? Isn't Starcraft closed source? Did they hack the binaries to allow exposing an API or something? If so isn't this project illegal? Or did Starcraft provide a C++ API all along?

haasted• 17 years ago

The "Getting started" section of the page explains this.

Apparently it is possible to script Starcraft using a C++ API.

http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition#GettingStarted

FooBarWidget2• 17 years ago

Yeah but is this C++ API official or is it hacked into the binary by third parties?

Starcraft AI competition

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