Starcraft AI blog

Here are the participants in AIST S4 sorted by BASIL elo, with the latest BASIL update as a guide to gauge how much the bot may yet be updated by the submission deadline of 15 March. If it has been a long time since the last update, the author may have taken the opportunity to make big changes, so the elo is a less reliable guide.

Elo is pretty good, but even the best forecast can’t predict the results of a knockout tournament with random seeding. If we take elo as perfect, then any bot in the bottom half might get a tough pairing in the first round and fall to the loser’s bracket, then face another tough pairing. In reality elo is not perfect and even a top player might be knocked out early with bad luck in the BO3 matches. Also, 6 players do not make an exact power of 2 bracket, so I expect that some bots will get a bye the first round and the remainder will have to play an extra match, facing a longer road. The bracket works out if 2 bots get a bye the first round, so that 4 play in the first round and 2 drop to the loser’s bracket. Then round 1 and round 2 of the winner’s bracket both have 4 players.

Nevertheless, Stardust is clearly the favorite to win. We probably have a good handle on BananaBrain’s strength, since it was updated only a few days ago. PurpleWave I hope will have fixed the issues that harmed its performance in SSCAIT—unfinished improvements, we’re told—so it may be able to pass BananaBrain and meet Stardust in the final. Dragon may or may not get a big update, since it has not been reuploaded since October. If it does, it might suddenly become a contender.

Steamhammer, I don’t mind saying, has important updates and should play a more lucid game than the current BASIL version. On the other hand, I have stayed true to my intention of treating the tournament season as over—although it’s not—meaning that I disfavor safe improvements and favor work on basic infrastructure and new features that may need tuning. I don’t have time or resources to test intensively, so I accept risks of bugs and unexpected consequences and poor tuning. Either way, success or failure, Steamhammer may cross the plans of any bots that try to prepare specifically against it. I think my odds are good of, at last, avoiding the bottom spot in AIST. And I hope to beat one of the protosses.