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CoG 2021 prospects

The registered competitors for CoG 2021 were announced a few days ago on the results page. The submission deadline is not until 25 July.

Here are the new entrants. I sorted them in order of their current BASIL rank, which is a fair guess at how the tournament may work out.

  • BananaBrain
  • Stardust
  • Microwave
  • McRave
  • CUNYbot (aka Bryan Weber)
  • Granite

As I write, BananaBrain and Stardust are rated identically on BASIL, at 3068 elo. BananaBrain has fallen a bit; recently it was higher. I think it is likely that Stardust will get a tournament update, since it hasn’t had a public update in half a year. BananaBrain has had frequent updates and is closer to current. If so, then Stardust remains the favorite to hold its #1 finish. But BananaBrain has improved a lot, and tournaments are decided by results, not predictions! CUNYbot is the baby here, rated about 200 elo lower than McRave zerg. But it also has gone a long time without updates, and I don’t expect it to play without a tournament update—plus it showed strong improvement before updates paused. It may be able to hold itself off the floor.

Granite is a new name. CoG does not list authors or any other info, so I know nothing more about it. Historically, new names are often disappointing, but occasionally one is great. I have hope.

Here are the carryovers. PurpleWave is last year’s version (I expect that Purple Dan is not satisfied with progress). The others are being carried over for the second year. I sorted these by their finish in CoG 2020.

  • PurpleWave
  • BetaStar
  • XiaoYi
  • MetaBot

That makes 6 protoss, 3 zerg, and 1 meager terran (the same lonely terran as last year), and the terran scored only 37% in last year’s tournament. The race balance is lopsided. XiaoYi and MetaBot are likely to end up as punching bags that stronger bots try to score almost perfectly against.

Last year, 8 bots competed. This year, 10 bots are expected. But one constant has been that not all registrants end up submitting an acceptable bot—last year also had 10 bots expected, and 2 dropped out. Maybe this year will be better?

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McRave on :

Good luck to everyone! I hope we can get more submissions for AIIDE.

MarcoDBAA on :

If people want more/new authors/submissions, someone needs to run one ladder at least, that also includes weak bots. Which means, that newcomers have genuine competition, not just allowing them to be punching bags in a strong field for a while until disabling them again.

You (not really YOU, just answering in general) might not believe me, but the situtation was better, when many weaker bots were not disabled yet. And I talked about it here, and looks like I am right? It is just sad like that.

If I had money to run another PC all day just for that, I would even do it... Not possible however.

Dan on :

The website seems not to have been updated but I am participating as Protoss. Somehow they never received my registration -- and there was no confirmation step in the process -- but was on pubic record as planning to compete as Protoss.

And actually I'm feeling very good for the event. This season has been a chance to polish all the new features I added in a hurried attempt to catch up to with what everyone was doing while I was mired in the issues caused by the 4.4 client timing bugs. PurpleWave hasn't looked itself on ladder but it'll arrive in top form.

Jay Scott on :

Great! Maybe you are why they said this (in the update list on the web front page): “Now, there’s a issue for a missing entry that will be corrected soon.”

Dan on :

I'll add that I'm committed to registering and participating in any event that someone is taking the trouble to host. Odds of winning or the current state of my bot aren't factors. If it appears that I haven't, it's probably in error.

MicroDK on :

What is the reason Steamhammer is not registered for CoG?

Jay Scott on :

I still feel disillusioned with the quality of the tournament. Every year seems to have some snafu.

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