Starcraft AI blog

AIIDE. Steamhammer will play in AIIDE again this year. I expect to bring a new version—it has been too long. Steamhammer’s infrastructure for some important new skills is almost ready, so if all goes as it should I will shatter your futile hopes with lurker spines!

I like the map rules this year: Five chosen from last year’s maps, five from a long list of varied maps. It’s a compromise between the guaranteed quality of a fixed map pool and CoG’s historical plan of selecting the maps from a list with inconsistent quality, some of which bots struggle on. The AIIDE list is large but sorted by quality, and the allowed maps have relatively few features that bots can’t cope with. Well, the list is long enough that there are several maps I don’t recognize.

I have often tested Steamhammer on random maps from a large collection, including utterly nonstandard Blizzard maps. It’s not good (yet) at taking advantage of map features, but it’s solid and consistent on standard-ish maps. It may be to my advantage.

CoG. The conference runs from 21-24 August, so results should be out soon. The roster includes one new bot, ProtossPleb, whose name and information does not look promising in itself. But we’ll see. The other participants are several familiar top finishers.

ASL Season 16 started this week. No great games so far, but I enjoyed Calm’s clever play against Rain in group B of the round of 24. The best games are often in the round of 8.

I tried turning comments back on, but it seems the feature grew a technical problem on the new webhost. Stand by for repairs.