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Comments: 200 +-   StarCraft AI Competition Announced on Thursday November 12, @01:31PM

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday November 12, @01:31PM
from the here-comes-the-reaperzerg dept.
programming
rts
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bgweber writes "The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust, commercial RTS environment. The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top-performing bots."
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Submission: AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition by bgweber (1676858)
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StarCraft AI Competition Announced 50 Comments More | Reply /

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  • What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3, Funny)

    by webdog314 (960286) on Thursday November 12, @01:35PM (#30076380)
    Let's teach our AI systems how to do battle... against humans. Skynet anyone?
  • So they are using the old StarCraft and not the new upcoming StarCraft? I love the old StarCraft. I was really looking forward to the new one until they gutted it by removing LAN play. I would rather play the old version is all its 640x480 glory then play a LAN game over the WAN. Sure I have the bandwidth, but it's the principle. Won't someone think of the Zerglings?

  • Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ChowRiit (939581) on Thursday November 12, @01:39PM (#30076474)

    Perhaps a game not so dominated by rushing tactics would be a better choice of base game? It definitely seems an interesting idea, but there must be games better suited to an AI contest like this...

    • Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Monkeedude1212 (1560403) on Thursday November 12, @01:45PM (#30076570)

      How would you rather it be setup? I have not found a single RTS that isn't dominated by Rushing Tactics. I still play Age of Empires 2 for the whole walling off thing but it still doesn't beat a well developed rush.

      • Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Sprotch (832431) on Thursday November 12, @02:14PM (#30077084)
        A good player can defend against a rush in Starcraft. It's all about micro-managing peons until your first combat unit arrives. Then you go head straight for their economically challenged base.

      • How would you rather it be setup? I have not found a single RTS that isn't dominated by Rushing Tactics.

        Company of Heroes. http://www.companyofheroes.com/ [companyofheroes.com]

        It's a modern RTS which utilizes things such as directional cover, suppression and per-squad reinforcements, as well as rewards proper flanking. Unless, of course, you try to prevent said flanking by placing some barbed wire and mines...

        There is no such thing as rushing in CoH; the game doesn't reward rushing because it will end with a horribly tragic loss for the player who attempts it (!). You can't wall-off because you need some map control, resources need to be connected to your base in order to receive them, and your low popcap (based on the number of captured sectors) spells your ultimate doom. The nature of the game is that for the most part, each side has no more than ten units on the field. You can be a very good player even if you aren't a hyperactive teen capable of performing ten clicks per second.

        Bottom line: if someone wants to rush you, you will win the game in five minutes. But if you want to wall-off, this game isn't for you, as it requires constant fighting on multiple parts of the map.

        • > There is no such thing as rushing in CoH

          Yes, because you start with two machine gun nests in your base, making rushes impossible. CoH sucks.

      • Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by FauxPasIII (75900) on Thursday November 12, @02:27PM (#30077300)

        Star Trek Armada and Armada II had a decent approach to preventing early-game rushes; your "town hall" equivalent building (starbase) is armed to the teeth. =)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by vertinox (846076)

        How would you rather it be setup? I have not found a single RTS that isn't dominated by Rushing Tactics. I still play Age of Empires 2 for the whole walling off thing but it still doesn't beat a well developed rush.

        This is why I prefer Real Time Tactics Games to Real Time Strategy games.

        You know... Like Total War series...

    • Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Informative)

      by DreadPiratePizz (803402) on Thursday November 12, @01:49PM (#30076640)
      You have no idea what you're talking about do you? Go watch the professionals play and see how often they rush. Not that often anymore. Modern Starcraft is dominated by Fast Expanding, which is quite the opposite of a rush.

      • Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Monkeedude1212 (1560403) on Thursday November 12, @01:52PM (#30076688)

        It's been a couple of years, but whenever I watched Boxer in the Korean SC tournaments a while back - the match is usually over within 15 or 20 minutes because they'd never need to progress past Dragoons, Hydra's, or Medics.

        An expansive SC player would be destroyed by 8 zerglings before he could get that second Command center off.

        • Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by DreadPiratePizz (803402) on Thursday November 12, @01:57PM (#30076780)
          Not true at all, the 1 RAX Fast Expand build is designed to allow a Terran player to expand early and EASILY defend against 8 zerglings. For you information, a lot has changed in just a few years.

          • Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12, @03:07PM (#30077992)

            Expanding on the parent...

            Every matchup except for Zerg vs. Zerg starts with EXTREMELY fast expanding these days. Usually before they even have a single non-peon unit out. Hell, zergs expand TWICE right off the bat against Protoss. The players have figured out how to stop these early rushes with building placement, micro and build orders.

            If I were to guess, less than 2% of pro games in recent times are very early rushes aimed at killing a fast expanding players. Early rushes do happen more often than that but they are always with the intent of doing economic damage to get an advantage in the late game.

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by EvanED (569694)

              Every matchup except for Zerg vs. Zerg starts with EXTREMELY fast expanding these days. Usually before they even have a single non-peon unit out

              That's not really true, at least the latter part. Protoss will often forge fast-expand, especially against Zerg, but other openings like one gate tech aren't uncommon. For terran, you almost never see expand-before-marine, and often there's no expand until the factory is building.

              So you *see* FEs like that in each matchup, I wouldn't call them *the* standard build

    • What if, through the developers' virtual arms race, the AIs discover that rushing isn't actually the best way to win? Given enough room to experiment, could new, anti-rush gambits emerge that human players wouldn't have thought of?

    • Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NeutronCowboy (896098) on Thursday November 12, @01:50PM (#30076662)

      I don't know how you define rush.... I've had people complain that an attack after 10 minutes was a rush. Even the 6-pool was easily defeated by the proper build order and positioning. As a matter of fact, I liked SC more than others because every strategy had a proper counter. The only thing that was required was scouting - otherwise the other person could come in with the counter to your troops.

      While I don't think it is a great medium for a test, it's a pretty good one. Especially if the AI has to deal with fog of war.

    • Rushing is an elementary strategy. You should learn to defend against it rather than complaining that it isn't far (in a war simulation game no less).

    • Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chris Mattern (191822) on Thursday November 12, @01:51PM (#30076678)

      StarCraft is only dominated by rush tactics when the players don't have the skills to defend against a rush. In StarCraft attempting a rush dooms you to failure if the rush doesn't fatally wound your opponent ('cause you stunted your economy to build your rushers). Correctly defending against a rush is mostly micromanagement (using your workers correctly to defend, which means constantly issuing them the attack orders they need since they won't attack on their own, while keeping some working on your economy). AIs should excel at micromanagement. I don't think rushing would be a problem in a StarCraft AI match.

        • Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Khashishi (775369) on Thursday November 12, @03:49PM (#30078644) Journal

          I'd like to see how this statement changes after the winner of the competition is unveiled.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Trepidity (597)

          I don't see any inherent reason why AI should be bad at dancing units. If anything it should be better at it, because the essentially infinite click speed and ability to attend to multiple places at once means that an AI could dance multiple groups of units at different parts of the map at all once, which for humans is something only really skilled players can do.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Trepidity (597)

      For logistical reasons there aren't a lot of options. Past competitions have used Wargus [sourceforge.net], since it's open source. Game-industry people tend to roll their eyes at it though, and would prefer a competition using a "real" RTS, i.e. a popular mainstream one. Starcraft is one of the only choices for that, because someone's made an API for it [ucsc.edu] that allows you to write external AI to play the game. Most commercial RTSs don't have any way of doing that, unless you were to screen-scrape the display and then have to i

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by odourpreventer (898853)

        > Rush tactics are barely used in pro-matches

        Yes and no. Players often apply the *threat* of a rush, forcing the opponent to build more defences.

  • Human Advantages:
    Advanced Prediction
    Flexible Stategies
    Arguably Faster Learning

    AI Advantages:
    Able to command all units at once
    Usually More efficient w/ resources
    Instant Macro management

    Another advantage to the AI could include knowing the map layout and what the player has at all times, which is something the original starcraft had so the AI would know whether to rush you or not.

    • which is something the original starcraft had so the AI would know whether to rush you or not.

      It may have just been my limited experience with the AIs but most of the time it seemed that the AI was on a pretty fixed schedule in terms of attacks. If the AI had any comprehension of what the human player had built then I'd say that the AIs were very very poorly designed. They'd attack massive defense with a dozen zealots when a human player that knew the defense was there would have known it was futile to h

      • Re:Breakdown (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Chyeld (713439) <[moc.yugswen] [ta] [dleyhc]> on Thursday November 12, @02:19PM (#30077164)

        Most game AI's are not well designed, but not because they can't be. Most game AI's are built from the prespective that the player should be able to win, therefore Grandmaster level thinking is less desirable than preditable patterns that seem impossible to be till the player realizes they can be exploited.

        • Re:Breakdown (Score:4, Informative)

          by RedFlames (1618315) on Thursday November 12, @04:17PM (#30079082)
          (I apologize in advance for the lack of paragraph spacing. Slashdot appears not to recognize the carriage return/line feed from this browser/computer?) Most games(I dare say almost all AAA titles) don't have anything resembling actual AI. Including AI is very very expensive computationally, it simply isn't feasible for most of the lower-end consumer users. To get around this, most games include a large variety of playbooks that define how the computer opponent should build, what to build, when to attack, etc... Sometimes there are minimal elements of AI, such as "if (terran) skip zergling rush". But, by and large, the AI is simply following a set of rules of when/what to build. If you switch the mode to "hard", most games simply ratchet up the minerals/second income for the computer, or remove fog of war (all Blizzard games do this). If you wish to experiment for yourself the 'ORTS' engine is a near replica of StarCraft but fully open-sourced. (http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/orts/) I believe there are multiple AI examples included (there used to be) so you can foray into the challenges presented by real AIs; computers that actually adapt their playing style to your own. As a warning, the engine does not abstract away details to make it easier (eg: there are unit collisions, writing a script to mine a patch of minerals effectively suddenly became much much harder). Disclosure: I am not affiliated with the ORTS engine directly, but I did take a class in my undergrad doing game AI on it.

          • Re:Breakdown (Score:4, Informative)

            by Red Flayer (890720) on Thursday November 12, @05:10PM (#30080062) Journal

            (I apologize in advance for the lack of paragraph spacing. Slashdot appears not to recognize the carriage return/line feed from this browser/computer?)

            Allowed html is displayed below the comment form when you write a comment. Only the the following are allowed on slashdot:

            <b> <i> <p> <br> <a> <ol> <ul> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <em> <strong> <tt> <blockquote> <div> <ecode> <quote>

    • If it's an AI competition, I doubt the AI teams would be given any more information than the human teams had. Computers could be better at micro management, but probably not by enough to make up for humans' ability to adapt to changing circumstances and come up with new tactics on the fly.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by thepotoo (829391)
          RTFA. There are four competitions, and on the only "complete" game, all AIs have the completeMapInformation flag in the Broodwar API disabled. Therefore, fog of war is on.

    • Re:Breakdown (Score:5, Funny)

      by aliquis (678370) <dospam@gmail.com> on Thursday November 12, @01:58PM (#30076788) Homepage

      Human Advantages:
      Imagined Prediction Advantage
      Flexible Stategies
      Arguably Faster Learning

      AI Advantages:
      Able to command all units at once
      Usually More efficient w/ resources
      Instant Macro management

      Korean Advantages:
      Superior Strategies
      Advanced Prediction
      Flexible Tactics
      Arguably Faster Learning
      Able to command all units at once
      Usually More efficient w/ resources
      Instant Macro management

      Fixed that for you :D

  • AIIDE web site (Score:3, Informative)

    by MobyDisk (75490) on Thursday November 12, @02:08PM (#30076948) Homepage

    The aiide conference web site [aiide.org] has been Slashdotted... even though Slashdot didn't link to it. :-)

  • naughty ai would win (Score:5, Funny)

    by hort_wort (1401963) on Thursday November 12, @02:55PM (#30077782)

    My AI would design its base to be a rough representation of a naughty picture on the minimap. Human players would always lose as they just let the AI build away to see the picture get a higher resolution.

    • Re:blacksheepwall (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tawnos (1030370) on Thursday November 12, @02:56PM (#30077798)

      It must be very difficult if you cannot click the link under "rules"
      #
      Programs that attempt to cheat will be disqualified

            1.
                  Bots must disable the perfect information flag in tournaments 1,2 and 4

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Goateee (1415809)
      A player could feel more satisfied if it plays against a computer with the same knowledge and resources as a human player, because then it would have to play more like a human. With such cheats, the player will feel annoyed that the computer always attack when he is the weakest, without real knowledge, or can attack with twise the units he know is the maximum at a given time.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by aXis100 (690904)

      If you like TA, check out Spring at http://springrts.com/ [springrts.com]

      This is an open source fully 3d replica of TA. They've now built it to the point where it is a base engine that can host one of several mods - mostly based on TA style models and concepts, although a few are completely unique. AI's are plugins that can work over several mods if the author chooses so.

      My favourite is the Complete Annihillation Mod - http://springrts.com/wiki/Complete_Annihilation [springrts.com]
      The "chicken" mode has a weak AI, but enough brute force

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