
StarCraft AI Competition Results Announced - phreeza
http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/10/starcraft-ai-competition-results/
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zeteo
More detail on the winning bot Overmind:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWtpTu9gB20&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWtpTu9gB20&feature=player_embedded)

They had a team of 13 Berkeley AI researchers working on this bot.

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Brashman
Thread on Team Liquid forums (Starcraft community site as well as Starcraft
team) about this:
[http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=160...](http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=160539)

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sliverstorm
Man, watching those mutas fly around really makes me wish _I_ could personally
interface with BWAPI. I've always wished it was possible to manage each unit
individually, even in combat.

I guess that's what turn-by-turn games like Advance Wars are for though.

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zeteo
The winning bot's strategy seems a bit one-sided (mutalisk-heavy). I guess no
bots were good enough to build real counters to that? Looking at the videos,
everyone is trying to kill mutalisk with Goliaths, which is not exactly the
strongest tactic.

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aperiodic
Goliaths are the standard response to mutalisks, as goliaths are Terran's
strongest anti-air unit. They have a pretty good dps vs air, and they
significantly outrange mutalisks.

The Berkeley bot's mutalisk micro was just too good.

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zeteo
Goliaths alone? I don't think so. Any player with good micro (and we're
talking bots here) will keep dancing out the damaged mutas, since Goliaths
can't follow to kill. You should at least throw a couple of Valks into the
mix. A bot could also pull off the cloaked Wraith + medic combo, perhaps.

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simonsarris
Scourge snipe valks since they cannot move between attacks #1 and 8.

Valks also cannot fire once there are too many sprites/actions going on. They
may have been excluded because of that if you didnt see any.

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henryci
Does anybody know how these bots perform against humans players? This seems to
be early enough in its infancy that I would expect humans to outperform
computer players pretty significantly but I might have too much faith in my
own race.

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PureSin
In a straight up game, if the human plays standard then the computer will have
a pretty good chance.

The main issue is stracraft is pretty complex and if the computer is
predictable, a human can just exploit that for easy victory. (always 6 pooling
for example)

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eru
Yes. Although build orders are not a very good example --- because that's on
area where computers can be made more flexible and random without too much
difficulty.

I guess that bots' micromanagement will become superior to humans, if it isn't
already. A bot won't have any problem coordinating three or four battles at
the same time. For humans it's quite hard to fight a multi-front war given
StarCraft's UI.

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sliverstorm
Are there any plans for the winner to assimilate the loosers, as it wasn't
hands-down the best?

