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StarCraft AI Competition Results
bgweber writes "The StarCraft AI Competition announced last year has come to a conclusion. The competition received 28 bot submissions from universities and teams all over the world. The winner of the competition was UC Berkeley's submission, which executed a novel mutalisk micromanagement strategy. During the conference, a man versus machine exhibition match was held between the top ranking bot and a former World Cyber Games competitor. While the expert player was capable of defeating the best bot, less experienced players were not as successful. Complete results, bot releases, and replays are available at the competition website."
Bots in FPS ARE a completely different thing, as setting up an auto-headshot sniper that will hit the player before he can get the bot into view is not that difficult to make. That field will never be an even battle.
Strategy games are a little different though. A Bot essentially has no "better" way to evaluate the player than any other player would evaluate the player. Say in Starcraft, the Bot scouts the player - and determines he is a little behind in what he would expect the player's army count to be. This could mean a number of things: The player made a mistake, the player is saving up, or theres something the player has that you have not found yet. How do you proceed?
Now - when you get to the pro level of gaming, you worry a little less about your opponent's build and worry more about not letting them know yours. Walling and other defensive techniques become just as important as scouting your opponent. The game becomes highly a higly reactive scenario as opposed to proactive. If you know what your opponent is doing, you can counter it and that puts you much further ahead, possibly ahead enough to crush them.
So the problem eventually lies in getting an AI to properly counter a players actions. Making an AI react to players is much harder than giving an AI a plan and telling him to execute. Because essentially the reaction is only as smart as whoever is programming the AI. And if you are a better player, capable of keeping other people from determining your plan, you can beat an AI who is trying to determine yours.
Don't get me wrong, the ability for computers to instantly Micro and Macromanage all of the units and resources at once does give it some serious advantages, but deep in the heart of it: The AI will only be a little better of a player than the person who programs him. (Or her, if you program female AI's like GLaDOS)
> No human can really keep up with 2 100% controlled and coordinated attacks. Mainly because we have to split our resources between them. The AI could realistically perfectly control 2 attacks with all the skill that a human player could devote to a single attack.
The biggest problem is the INTERFACE of the game. Let me know when I can create on-the-fly Picture-In-Picture overviews of the map in real-time, so I _actually_ can attack/defend on multiple fronts.
Sad to see RTSs really haven't changed in 20 years ;-(
Have a look at the Spring Engine if you haven't already. There are a variety of RTS games, including some high-quality variants of Total Annihilation, which use the Spring Engine and allow for all sorts of client-side scripting through Lua. There are a variety of client-side lua "gadgets" that players have written already. You can move your units into custom formations by drawing lines or squiggles with the mouse; there are widgets to automate using air transports to ferry units between factories and rally points; there are even widgets to automatically alert the player when certain dangerous units are spotted. IIRC, someone was even working on a script for kiting with long-range units.