
A History of Starcraft AI Competitions - jonbaer
http://www.cs.mun.ca/~dchurchill/starcraftaicomp/history.shtml
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dgant
Hi all. I'm an author of a currently competing Starcraft AI and am pretty
familiar with the scene and the techniques used. Happy to answer any
questions.

This article is from 2015. Some recent updates: Facebook and Alibaba recently
published papers on using pure learning techniques for controlling units,
showing great progress while having a ways to go before catching up to
traditional techniques. Google DeepMind is collaborating with Blizzard to make
these competitions possible for Starcraft 2. And Martin Rooijackers, author of
2016 SSCAIT champion LetaBot, wrote an update on more recent developments:
[http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/521711-berkeley-
overmind-20-...](http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/521711-berkeley-
overmind-20-bots-have-gone-full-circle)

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debacle
[https://www.twitch.tv/sscait](https://www.twitch.tv/sscait)

A 24/7 stream of AI matchups. Games are played at double speed. Some of the
strategies are very interesting, but many of the strategies are either brute
forced or designed specifically to beat other strategies.

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mental1896
Very cool. Thanks for sharing this!

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hkmurakami
This reminds me of the recent Day[9] rant about Broodwar's mechanical
difficulty being an integral part of what makes it a great "realtime" strategy
game, and that the mechanics are inseparable from the strategy part of the
game. [1]

His analogy of taking out mechanics from Broodwar being equivalent to taking
out athleticism from Football was particularly insightful.

BW AI (in its culmination) to me is what Broodwar looks like when you take out
the mechanics from the game and make it 100% about strategy and the execution
of said strategy. It's really fascinating to see the differences between AI
play and human bounded play.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP9F-AZezCU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP9F-AZezCU)

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thefalcon
I bet that a number of Brood War AI developers could still learn tricks from
the Pros. Here's another Day[9] video about some of the intricacies in Brood
War's mechanics, and how they came to be exploited in pro play:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvoMrYCQBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvoMrYCQBU)

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dgant
The absence of such techniques is usually due to prioritization rather than
ignorance. Most of the time the challenge is just the sheer complexity of
basic decisionmaking. The author of this article did a frame-by-frame
breakdown of unit attack animation timings, but "should I fight or run" is by
itself still an interesting and important question.

The #1 bot as I write this, Iron Bot, has Vulture micro that is in many ways
better than any pro, by using frame-perfect patrol kiting.

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sbwm
I worked on one of the agents for the first ORTS competition, waaay back in
2006. We were interested in Starcraft (which ORTS was a knockoff of) as a
testbed for human-level AI, since ostensibly it has a pretty strong need for
covering the entire "stack" from low-level reactions to planning and strategy.
The strategic game is also open-ended enough that it seemed it would be
especially interesting for testing humanlike AI compared to something like
Chess or Go that can be reduced to a state search and heavily optimized.

What ended up happening was that actually winning the game came down to unit
pathfinding and micromanagement (as well as plain old "not crashing"), and the
planning and strategy part didn't really come out. So we moved on to other
things.

I admittedly have not paid attention to this in years, but it looks like the
modern game is still very much like that except much more mature, the
strategic parts seem to be selecting heavily-optimized strategies from a
playbook, making up something new doesn't help win the competition.

Does anyone know of any ongoing AI competitions that push more on the
creative/strategic side?

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daveguy
I see from the article that, at least as of 2015, they still allow "unlimited"
actions per minute. Does anyone know if there's a plan to drop the apm to a
more human level in any of these tournaments? It would be interesting to see a
competition where micro-control of units was not a prominent factor.

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taneq
I'd expect that to happen when AIs start beating top human players.

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macrael
The video of one of the top bots playing a top human makes it seem like the AI
has a long long way to go. I don't know if it was just the AI recognizing that
it couldn't win any encounters so it just held back and lost even worse, or if
it's strategy is just bad, but the human player made it look terrible.

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FrozenVoid
The AI doesn't "See the opponent" as humans do, like if there is a enemy
transport incoming, a human opponent would prioritize it, micro around to
destroy it, evac/spread out worker units before it lands(e.g. defending
against reaver drops) and prevent/stop it from leaving(removing future
threat).

An AI would react to the transport as some data item in its to-do list and not
recognize the threat of drop UNTIL it landed, just following the script and
being purely reactive. A human player is proactive, he doesn't follow 'the
script' and adapts to real-time events, even changing build orders to adapt to
enemy army. These bots micro is geared to just win local battles(mini-
scripts), not to read-ahead and prepare.

In tactics and micro, despite having higher-APM and reaction speed, humans
have more nuanced understanding of tactics depending on terrain/unit
positioning, while bots rely on brute-force and simple repeatable actions,
limited by their programming. Unlike complete information on the board, RTS
forces these "rapid plan changes" where things occur 'out of the script' and
AI has no idea how to fight it, making mistakes and losing resources. AI is
blind to future threats and implications of build orders, while humans always
send spies and try to predict enemy future plans. Knowing that enemy has 3
expansions instead of 2 means alot to human player, while AI wouldn't see when
it loses attack opportunity window against weaker expansions(due less army
units).

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wazanator
Interesting that they picked Star Craft over something already open source
like Warzone 2100. Star Craft is obviously much more popular but picking
something already open seems to me like it would allow for better control.

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Ralfp
WZ 2100, besides being relatively unknown, suffers from slower pace and far
more complex tech tree. SC has three distinct races, relatively basic tech
trees, and promotes fast and aggressive gameplay.

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Razengan
I wonder how long it's going to be before somebody makes an MMO with a
persistent world, where you fight against an AI that learns from every player
in the world...

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alexmorenodev
It's kinda like a new world of readings has opened to me.

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futun
Aaand...one more datapoint showing us that Protoss were underpowered.

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blueside
don't worry, they made up for it in Starcraft 2

