Starcraft AI blog

I predicted Steamhammer to finish at #11 in SSCAIT this year, and hoped it would do a little better. It finished tied for #12-13. On the one hand, it’s only a little lower than I expected. On the other, the difference in games from what I expected is glaring, to my eyes. When I made the prediction, I didn’t realize that Steamhammer’s saved learning data had been reset at some recent time. In the games I saw, Steamhammer had about 8 past games of data on each opponent. I did not imagine that Steamhammer might lose 2 games in a row to XIMP by Tomas Vajda, and 2 games in a row to WuliBot, and other losses to fixed-strategy opponents—it simply doesn’t happen when Steamhammer is trained up.

I estimate that if Steamhammer had won its “easy” games at the rate it does on BASIL, it would have finished at #10, with a chance of reaching #9. It would have been as I hoped.

Today’s finals round 1 match against Halo by Hao Pan was awful. Steamhammer scores over 60% versus Halo on BASIL. In the SSCAIT round robin it scored 2-0 using a ling flood strategy, which won when Halo opened its wall prematurely. In today’s match the ling flood failed, though it was close. Steamhammer didn’t have much experience to back up its next choices, and made poor ones.

Steamhammer’s next match is in the loser’s bracket against #13 McRaveZ. I think its odds are under 50%.