Starcraft AI blog

I found another game that both bots recorded as a loss. The cause is different. While I try to figure it out, here is business as usual:

Blue is good for Microwave, red is good for Dragon.

microwave strategies versus dragon strategies

Microwave beat the worker rush with both 4PoolSoft and 5HatchPool (5 hatcheries before pool), which implies that it has a special reaction to the worker rush.

The fullest cells are 9PoolSpeed versus “2rax mech”, with 21 games, and 4PoolSoft versus the same with 12 games. No other cell has more than 7 games. This is despite the fact that Dragon barely played 3 of its 7 openings. When the bots have this many plans available, it is statistically impossible for a bot to discover purely from experience against one opponent how its choices interact with its opponent’s choices. Microwave’s answer to that is the same as Steamhammer’s: Simplify its understanding of the opponent’s opening to a small number of vaguely specified plans like HeavyRush. I don’t think that answer will scale to a high level of play. I think bots need either prior knowledge of how opening plans interact, or else the ability to reason about how plans interact, perhaps with a search algorithm. One way to produce the prior knowledge would be to run the imaginary search algorithm offline.

dragon as seen by microwave

Microwave sees the enemy builds largely as either factory first or expansion first.