Starcraft AI blog

I will never run a tournament. I don’t have the stomach for that much administrative work (and hats off to those who do!). So it’s perfectly safe for me to offer advice—I know I’ll never have to listen to it myself.

The way I see it, one goal of tournaments is to prod bots to improve; tournaments motivate. Another goal is to measure progress; tournament organizers are happy to include older bots that have competed in past tournaments, to see how they do against newer competition. There’s some tension between the two goals, but you don’t want to compromise either of them too much.

Earlier I suggested changing timeout rules to prod the winner to finish the game. Another way to prod bots is to make them play on new maps that present different challenges. Unfortunately, most of the concept maps that I talked about seem too hard for current bots (and the novelty maps are not suitable for competitions). Exception: The map Fantasy is not too hard, but it’s too subtle. Stepping down a level, I don’t know any current bot that can play on an island map. Even ignoring balance issues, a tournament would not want to include an island map like Charity, or even a semi-island map like Indian Lament, because it would break the goal of measuring progress. Bots that were made able to play the maps would likely score 100% against bots that could not.

There is a compromise. I suggest the map Namja Iyagi, a land map with 4 mineral-only islands (one in the corner behind each main base) and 2 mineral-and-gas islands. A bot with island skills would have a large advantage over a bot without island skills (the prod)—but not necessarily a decisive advantage. Two bots with no island skills could still play sound games against each other. If Namja Iyagi is only one map out of several, the tournament results remain a fair measure of progress.

The map Return of the King has 4 islands, so it might be a gentler prod.

Another prod that would be good is a map that promotes (but does not require) pushing through minerals or mineral-walking through obstacles, as in some of the concept maps. I’m not sure what a good choice would be, though.

A Team Liquid thread RFC: BW AI Bot Ladder proposes a much fancier attempt to encourage progress.

Tomorrow: Map balance.