Starcraft AI competition(users.soe.ucsc.edu)
users.soe.ucsc.edu
Starcraft AI competition
http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~bweber/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=starcraft_aiide_2010
55 comments
I have not yet fully read the API. This is an unfounded idea but I am curious: if we could hack it so that developers could shoot it out over the internet prior to the combination, would anyone want a HN league?
I think this is a great idea. I haven't read more than the description page yet, so i don't know if it's possible either, but I think that if it is possible then that would be a great way to iteratively test production. I also wonder if it will be possible to play against your bot early on. They mention in the description that they'll have top players playing the bots at the tournaments, but I wonder if it's easy to get that set up at home. I should think so, but you never know. If it is easy it would be rather fun to play your own bot.
I'd definitely be interested.
Oh definitely. More opponents to train against.
I'd be interested.
While we're talking about StarCraft, I'm on the MIT team and we're hosting an exhibition match against Caltech on Saturday. It'll be streaming if you want to watch: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=105...
Dreaming about this kind of thing is one reason I went into computer science.
I often wished that I had a cyborg-mode: gaming with a very programmable interface. (With basically something like Emacs and a REPL.) I could teach the computer new things as I explored, and eventually start to play in a very high-level way.
A friend worked on a gaming company where you train an algorithm to play a fighter in a mortal combat style game. The way you train it is by playing against it. Then you release it into the wild to fight other AIs using your style. When it came back, it was better than you, but not for long.
Product didn't go anywhere, but the architecture could easily be copied. It would be ridiculously cool to build this into Star Craft. There would be so many more people exposed to the AIs if all the knowledge needed to "program" them was in the game play itself.
Product didn't go anywhere, but the architecture could easily be copied. It would be ridiculously cool to build this into Star Craft. There would be so many more people exposed to the AIs if all the knowledge needed to "program" them was in the game play itself.
How exactly did the training work?
Thinking out loud, for a fighting game you have two obvious measurable criteria (your health bar and the health of your opponent) which constitute a 2D coordinate system. Any action you take which is expected to reduce your opponent's health more than your own is going to be a beneficial one (unless it will push you to death, in which case you need to go for attacks that have minimal cost to your own health).
The game state would be the positions of both players on the x-axis and the health bars for both players. If you had jumping and kneeling, you might want to record positions & momentums for both players in x & y.
Now a very simple kind of AI could look for periodic subsequences that could return it to the same position while causing more damage to the opponent than to itself. That is, do some sequence of moves (strike, jump, block, etc.) and then return to the original game state except that both health bars have changed.
Then do this again, as you've "reduced it to a previously solved problem".
This of course would be too simple a thing to do because the opponent's responses would (a) be nonrandom and (b) he would not return to the exact same position. So you would need to build up a statistical database of expected countermoves to each moves (and update that for each new opponent). You would also probably want a similarity function for game states.
I guess overall this shouldn't be too difficult to do if you recorded the game states of many real games between two players, because the game rules don't change over time. Once you've got a few difficult-to-counter loops that cost them more health than they cost you, you can run them over and over again.
Thinking out loud, for a fighting game you have two obvious measurable criteria (your health bar and the health of your opponent) which constitute a 2D coordinate system. Any action you take which is expected to reduce your opponent's health more than your own is going to be a beneficial one (unless it will push you to death, in which case you need to go for attacks that have minimal cost to your own health).
The game state would be the positions of both players on the x-axis and the health bars for both players. If you had jumping and kneeling, you might want to record positions & momentums for both players in x & y.
Now a very simple kind of AI could look for periodic subsequences that could return it to the same position while causing more damage to the opponent than to itself. That is, do some sequence of moves (strike, jump, block, etc.) and then return to the original game state except that both health bars have changed.
Then do this again, as you've "reduced it to a previously solved problem".
This of course would be too simple a thing to do because the opponent's responses would (a) be nonrandom and (b) he would not return to the exact same position. So you would need to build up a statistical database of expected countermoves to each moves (and update that for each new opponent). You would also probably want a similarity function for game states.
I guess overall this shouldn't be too difficult to do if you recorded the game states of many real games between two players, because the game rules don't change over time. Once you've got a few difficult-to-counter loops that cost them more health than they cost you, you can run them over and over again.
Also thinking out loud (out type?)
I agree with some of it... you'd need to keep track of the the location of each player on the x-axis and y-axis, momentums, etc... Additionally you'd want to keep track of the "visible" actions. For example, if the human hits the soft punch button, you can see the fist cocking before the punch. Similarly for other actions.
This gives you various points in the state space. The way I see doing this is:
1) Make the continuous variables discrete. You need enough granularity to have good responses of course...
2) Use genetic programming to pick reactions in each state. However, the reaction in each state is not a single action but a probability distributions over various actions (move left, move right, jump, punch, kick, etc...).
The randomness is key. I spent some time talking to a guy who plays in tournaments and he said that the absolute worst thing you can do is get into a cycle or become predictable.
I agree with some of it... you'd need to keep track of the the location of each player on the x-axis and y-axis, momentums, etc... Additionally you'd want to keep track of the "visible" actions. For example, if the human hits the soft punch button, you can see the fist cocking before the punch. Similarly for other actions.
This gives you various points in the state space. The way I see doing this is:
1) Make the continuous variables discrete. You need enough granularity to have good responses of course...
2) Use genetic programming to pick reactions in each state. However, the reaction in each state is not a single action but a probability distributions over various actions (move left, move right, jump, punch, kick, etc...).
The randomness is key. I spent some time talking to a guy who plays in tournaments and he said that the absolute worst thing you can do is get into a cycle or become predictable.
Was it via this product?
http://www.ailive.net/liveAI.html
http://www.ailive.net/liveAI.html
Keep those dreams alive! I'm sure one day you'll be in a position to make it happen.
How is this possible? Isn't Starcraft closed source? Did they hack the binaries to allow exposing an API or something? If so isn't this project illegal? Or did Starcraft provide a C++ API all along?
The "Getting started" section of the page explains this.
Apparently it is possible to script Starcraft using a C++ API.
http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition#GettingStarted
Apparently it is possible to script Starcraft using a C++ API.
http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition#GettingStarted
Yeah but is this C++ API official or is it hacked into the binary by third parties?
The API is third party. I'm pretty sure they are using this:
http://www.broodwarai.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=322 http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/
http://www.broodwarai.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=322 http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/
Wow, this looks awesome. Even if I don't make it into the competition, I'd love to play with the APIs.
I've always wanted to get into RTS games but I am just not very good at the mouse--I always get bogged down by failing to click on the right units and issue the right commands at the right times, and I've fond that once you make a few mistakes you usually don't recover, or you are back to square one.
Board games and turn-based games don't share this problem of course, but they aren't quite the adrenaline pumpers either... not worse, just different :-)
I've always wanted to get into RTS games but I am just not very good at the mouse--I always get bogged down by failing to click on the right units and issue the right commands at the right times, and I've fond that once you make a few mistakes you usually don't recover, or you are back to square one.
Board games and turn-based games don't share this problem of course, but they aren't quite the adrenaline pumpers either... not worse, just different :-)
This is a cross-post from Slashdot. Nonetheless, this is VERY cool. For those of you who missed the very interesting Mario competition, you have a while on this one.
Speaking of the mario competition, is there a way to watch videos of submissions?
Here's one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8
Impressive stuff. Others in the video responses below.
Impressive stuff. Others in the video responses below.
Robin's also released the source to his bot, if you want to run it locally: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rb1006/projects:marioai
All you need to run it is the latest competition code: http://code.google.com/p/marioai/
All you need to run it is the latest competition code: http://code.google.com/p/marioai/
You can run Team Proggit's bot locally pretty easily (one click if java is working right): http://rictic.com/marioai/
The Mario competition was held at the CIG 2009 conference. There has been talk of holding a StarCraft competition at CIG 2010. http://www.ieee-cig.org/
This is a cross-post from Slashdot.
Is this taboo?
Is this taboo?
I wasn't sure. I assumed that most people on here check both websites therefore it was redundent. However, speaking from experience, I don't see the point in commenting on a Slashdot thread, so I guess there's no reason for this to be a taboo.
Would love to compete, but the required investment of time seems potentially enourmous.
Well, you know, it would probably be an enormous investment to get a general-purpose bot that could win the tournament, but you could write a simple bot with simple strategies pretty quickly (assuming that the API is sane.) For example, you could write a bot that always executes the same kind of rush right away, or one that just tries to expand absolutely everywhere on the map as fast as it can until it has X supply of workers. That's both fun and a great addition to the competition since it diversifies the ecosystem that the serious bots have to deal with.
In programming AI players for various games, I've found that stupid algorithms with excellently-tuned parameters beat smart algorithms with decently-tuned parameters.
Any examples or intuition about why?
I don't know, but I could imagine overfitting could have something to do with it. Also simpler models are probably more robust.
I agree. I doubt I'll be able to invest the time to truly compete. But I definitely plan on creating something on the simpler end for fun. And if I can get a bot going that doesn't crash, why not submit it? And given a year until the deadline I see no drawbacks in playing with this casually.
Seeing as there already seem to be a lot of people involved in Starcraft AI, writing a WeeWar bot seems more rewarding to me for the time being. I don't think there are any good WeeWar bots yet. Besides, it might be used by a lot of people, for example newbies who want to train.
Just for laughs I guess I could try genetic programming. Something that evolves would interest me the most, anyway.
I'm fully with you on that one. I think the most interesting part is going to be creating a usable state space and reactions.
There are different tournaments for participants that want to focus on only a subset of the game. For example, you could hard code all locations for the tournament 3 contest and focus on macro.
The link looks broken. :/
I guess the defense against slash-dotting could not be sustained.
The site has been transferred to a new sub-domain to handle the traffic
On the one hand I'm surprised people are still playing this game. Then again, given how long Starcraft II has been taking to come out, I guess these guys have no choice but to enjoy what they have.
(PS - I'm not flaming them. I was an SC addict about 8 years ago untill WOW came out and everyone seemed to have lost interest.)
(PS - I'm not flaming them. I was an SC addict about 8 years ago untill WOW came out and everyone seemed to have lost interest.)
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What has become of the Starcraft lectures, are there transcripts yet? I suppose they would be mandatory viewing for coming up with a decent strategy...
http://academicearth.org/lectures/introduction-starcraft
http://academicearth.org/lectures/introduction-starcraft
I don't know about transcripts, but there are some pretty detailed summaries (minus the mathematical derivations) available here: http://www.sirlin.net/blog/category/starcraft-class
This video is great, I wasn't aware something like this existed. Thanks for posting the link.
I'd love to see some videos of these AIs playing against one another, especially if there was a really widescreen video that could show a split screen of what both AIs are doing at the same time.
All of the replay files will be made publicly available after the competition, see the rules page.
Wonder how it fares against the standard Starcraft AI?
The standard starcraft AI was always pretty pathetic, even after Blizzard's attempts to make it more challenging. My guess is that in the subset competitions (1 - 3) the sc AI would get whipped, if it could even be coerced into competing. (I don't think it could even do the micromanaging competition, I think the units would just sit there until they were attacked. And even then it would be the standard unit ai responding instead of the overall ai. It might fair a little better in the tech limited tournament.) I think the limited scope of those tournaments will allow the submitted bots to be highly optimized. It might fare better in the overall competition though, since both sides will be dealing with the full complexity of the game. But I still think that by the tournament the submitted bots will be highly superior to the built in ai.
Wasn't part of the Warcraft and Starcraft bot's technique that they cheated effectively and often knew things that a player couldn't have known (and executed on things that a player couldn't have?) in order to stand any chance at winning?
MMMM sounds cool. Would be nice to practice against some challenging AIs vs the crappy one provided by SC that cheats to win :P Specially without perfect awareness.
Would be awesome if the AIs had a difficulty tweak that allowed them to be used in actual SC games :)
Would be awesome if the AIs had a difficulty tweak that allowed them to be used in actual SC games :)