StarCraft AI Competition Announced

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."

Comments

Is StarCraft the right game to use for this?

[ChowRiit]

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?

[Monkeedude1212]

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?

[NeutronCowboy]

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.

Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent should be modded insightful.

Although I'm not an experienced RTS player, I am an experienced FPS player. People who claim that SC is dominated by rushing tactics are just as ignorant as the people who claim that dueling FPS games are dominated by item control or map knowledge. The answer to that is - Well duh. May as well claim it's about how well you use the keyboard and mouse.

There's way more that goes into it when you break it down to the specifics. For SC - are you effectively scouting your opponent's base and resources to get a feel for where to attack him, what to attack him with, and how to counter his counter-attack? For FPS games - what resource do you decide to deny your opponent, and how are you going to go about doing that? Do you spam explosives at a chokepoint, or do you prepare for an ambush in which you can retreat so that you wear him down?

Competitive games are complicated. Trying to simplify them in your mind doesn't make them simple.

Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this?

[vertinox]

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?

[Monkeedude1212]

In the time that you spent calling all your lumberjacks back to your town center, your opponents 10 militia Men will take down the Lumberyard, the Mill, any mining camps you have, and utterly destroy your economy so that when you finally manage to build a Barracks farther from your base and fend him off, he'll show up with some Horsemen to finish off the army you just built, and then when you take those out he'll be at your door with Battering Rams.

Either you aren't rushing properly, or your opponents aren't.

Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this?

[Khashishi]

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

Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this?

[Trepidity]

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:Breakdown

[Chyeld]

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:Easy to make..

[Goateee]

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.

Ah I get it

[tengeta]

Thats why StarCraft 2 was delayed, they don't even feel like writing the code anymore and want people to do it for free.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Disgruntled Goats]

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:Brood War

[10Neon]

Blizzard is basically trying to replicate all of the major features of a service like Steam, all in one go- and no, WoW expertise will only translate to the development slightly, if at all, since the Battle.net team is completely separate from the WoW team. It's not as if they just reassign all of their programmers (which likely don't even specialize in the kind of things a battle.net programmer would have to do), and put WoW expansions and updates on the back burner.
While there are undoubtedly other factors at play, I believe you are grossly overestimating the effects of those factors. Development time for a new service is more than sufficient a reason for a delay.
If I recall correctly, they were talking about Battle.net 2.0 features in a "we're going to have it but it's not implemented yet" way at this year's BlizzCon. That was three months ago. Considering the fact that is Blizzard we're talking about, a four or five month development time for anything is fast.