
Student StarCraft AI Tournament 2014 - tosh
http://sscaitournament.com/
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barosl
Years ago, when I first watched the videos of the contest, I was overwhelmed
by the micro that an AI plays with a bunch of Mutalisks. It never resembles a
human play - among a number of Mutalisks, each Mutalisk could be moved
completely indepdendently! Human player would never be able to imitate it.

As a South Korean whose national anthem is considered to be StarCraft Terran
Soundtrack[1], I really hope this contest lasts long.

[1] [http://youtu.be/GuytViFsZUw](http://youtu.be/GuytViFsZUw)

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breakk
Dont worry. It's been around since 2011 and I'm not planning to leave it.

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Kenji
Damn! I just watched a game Terran vs Protoss, the Protoss did a fast forge
expand with two cannons and then expanded to a third base. The terran made a
ton of marines and obliterated the third base. But then the AI thought the
game should be over because a base got destroyed. So the marines just stuck
around and tha AI got caught in a loop, slowing the game down and making the
terran lose (maybe loss by using too much CPU).

EDIT: After watching some more, I'm seriously impressed by some of those
programs. Cannon rushes, aggressive expanding, managing siege tanks and well-
rounded armies, that's what I've seen so far.

EDIT2: Something is weird, that one bot has "Our vs enemy supply" but how does
it obtain the number of enemy supply when everything is in the fog of war? Is
it getting the number out of the game memory? Is that allowed?

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granos
Why not? Thats what the actual StarCraft AI did above a certain level. They
also get extra resources per pull if you set it high enough.

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talmand
I would think the goal is to create human-like AI, not cheating AI that exists
solely to challenge strong players.

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breakk
Cheating is not allowed actually.. and API doesn't give you the information it
shouldn't. The goal is creating a strong AI players (not necessarily human-
like) that win without cheating.

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tinco
I can wholeheartedly recommend participating in this tournament as a student.
I built a bot for BWAPI a few years back and it taught me a great deal about
programming in hostile environments against unreliable API's and with
unreliable resources.

And that's all before you even get to true AI. You can skip all that and just
cut to the AI part by choosing to base your bot on one of the existing open
source AI's that are already available and continuously improved by the
community.

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allcentury
As someone who lost his entire high school life to Starcraft...

this looks like fun.

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ginko
So how would these AIs stack up against professional StarCraft players?

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Kenji
They (the AIs) would get completely stomped. As far as I know there isn't an
AI that comes even close.

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jankeromnes
So much cheese... but still impressive! I can't wait to see them get closer
and closer to pro level.

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xs
This is great. What other games can I play by legally modifying code to change
the way my player acts? One example that comes to mind is
[http://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/](http://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/)

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j_s
[http://www.codingame.com/contests](http://www.codingame.com/contests)

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etiam
I am delighted to see competitions are still being arranged with BWAPI. A few
years ago I was meaning to participate in the AIIDE competition but didn't
manage to cut out enough spare time to finish then. Looks like there's still
new chances.

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LinaLauneBaer
How do you make use of the stream if it doesn't show any gameplay?

Is the stream only managed from time to time?

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restalis
I caught it playing with over 130 live watchers for a few minutes half an hour
ago, until it stopped streaming and crashed.

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breakk
It's restarted after every 10 games and does offline for like 2 minutes
intentionally. Btw, it had 270 viewers few minutes ago - that's the most
viewed Brood War steram on TeamLiquid and most viewed of all the streams on
HitBox.tv ;)

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frik
Any chance some participant will release the source code afterwards?

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feefie
Under "Downloads & Links" see "List of Open-source Bots" (A list of bots that
can be downloaded and played against. Please add your bot here if you don't
mind sharing its code.)

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gondo
looks like mostly slovak and czech competition :)

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tinco
There's several U.S. universities represented, at least one Dutch and I also
see some cities in Germany, Austria and Denmark.

But yeah, the guy who started it is from there so obviously he has an easier
time marketing it to nearby universities.

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hwgd
awesome. something to put on my second screen at work =D

