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Comments: 200 +- Games: StarCraft AI Competition Announced on Thursday November 12, @01:31PM
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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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What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
at one point the AI will realize that it's far easier to beat the human by hacking in to military computers and nuking the player.
Then the human players will black out the sky.
Parent
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Funny)
*Nuclear launch detected*
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-Nuclear launch detected
especially if you are playing red.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Funny)
*Nuclear launch detected*
I remember playing Starcraft at a LAN party after I figured out how to rip the sound effects and voices out of the Starcraft data files. I'd intentionally play with the sound on (no headphones), wait just enough time so that it was believable yet frighteningly early, alt-tab over to a WAV player, then play the sound for "Nuclear launch detected" and watch people frantically scan their bases. It only works once, so use it wisely.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but then that means they will be less likely to check that second time when you really do launch nukes at them. That's when they end up getting humiliated.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I heard it in Protoss
Brood War (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Brood War (Score:5, Funny)
Instead of an AI that can win at Starcraft, maybe they ought to try to build an AI that can finish Starcraft 2.
Apparently, that's a much greater challenge.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They ought to release it with dedicated servers and LAN play and roll out Battlenet 2.0 when it's ready, if that is indeed the case.
Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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.
Parent
Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> 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)
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. =)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Parent
Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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
Possibility for emergent gameplay? (Score:2)
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)
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.
Parent
Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to see how this statement changes after the winner of the competition is unveiled.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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)
> 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.
Breakdown (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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)
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.
Parent
Re:Breakdown (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Breakdown (Score:4, Informative)
Allowed html is displayed below the comment form when you write a comment. Only the the following are allowed on slashdot:
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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)
Re:Breakdown (Score:5, Funny)
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
Parent
Re:Breakdown (Score:5, Funny)
Worst. Poem. Ever.
Parent
AIIDE web site (Score:3, Informative)
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)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Does AI have to be good? (Score:4, Informative)
Depends where you look. Last month's KESPA ratings [teamliquid.net] (the latest, at least on TLPD) put Jaedong at #1 and flash down at #6. In fact, the last time he wasn't #1 in that ranking was March.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA.
The competition is being held by Expressive Intelligence Studio at an AI conference. Blizzard has nothing to do with this, AFAIK.
Re:competition announced? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:blacksheepwall (Score:5, Informative)
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
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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