Starcraft AI blog

Purple Dan Gant did some analysis of the AIIDE 2023 map pool and kindly e-mailed info to me. Here it is; I edited it slightly for clarity.

• Ran games between PurpleWave and BananaBrain across all the AIIDE maps (based on what I think the legal maps are)
• All the maps ran (they were 1.16.1-compatible)
• Some of the maps in my zip appear to be observer maps which are unusable for bot play because they have extra start locations. All but Crossing Field have acceptable alternative versions in the pool
• PurpleWave worked correctly on all maps. Its behavior on Katrina was dumb but explicable due to the backyard natural

He offers results on a google spreadsheet: AIIDE 2023 Map Info (you have to switch between the About and Data sheets). And he created a new version of the map pool which may better represent what we should actually get: Dan’s unofficial copy of AIIDE 2023 map pool version 2.

Thanks, Dan! You have done a public service.

Steamhammer can play on all the maps, but on the ICCup observer maps it feels a need to scout the observer “bases” to make sure nobody’s there. It knows better than to try to expand there. There are maps where it can correctly reject observer slots as non-bases, but it depends on how they are set up. Steamhammer also plays stupidly on Katrina, and I don’t intend to fix it yet because it’s too much time cost to pay down a small risk. At some point I’ll teach it to do the terrain connectivity analysis from first principles, and create a graph that it can reason about. Playing on Outsider is a goal, but one step at a time.

Steamhammer work is coming along nicely. The new feature I’m adding is coming up to the finish line, and it is passing its tests so far. It won’t be fully refined yet, but still a good improvement. I should have time to add one more important feature before the tournament. Between them they will make the bot sharper at taking advantage of opportunities and more resilient when under pressure. Can’t ask more than that in a short timeframe.