Starcraft AI blog

Five maps were familiar ones used in past AIIDE tournaments, and five were chosen randomly from a large pool.

That makes 3 2-player maps, 2 3-player maps, and 5 4-player maps. It’s a good mix.

Each cell in the two tables represents 232 games, or occasionally 1 or 2 fewer if not all games completed successfully. I marked the carryover maps with dark headers, so you can look for patterns between familiar and new maps.

This table is the same as the map table in the official results except for the presentation. #5 McRave and #6 Microwave have clear likes and dislikes among the maps. The other mid-ranked zerg, #4 Steamhammer, shows more even results.

This is like yesterday’s game duration table, but by map instead of by opponent. The top number in each cell is the median duration of winning games; the bottom number is losing games.

On maps where #2 Stardust won the most quickly—it didn’t win as much. On Destination, I imagine it’s because the twin bridges to the natural bases are so easy to defend; if it doesn’t break through quickly, then it may struggle against its stronger opponents. That explanation doesn’t work for Empire of the Sun, though. #7 Dragon has a similar pattern. Compare #3 PurpleWave: On Longinus where it struggled, it lost more quickly.

#4 Steamhammer takes the map into account in its learning, which may make its performance more even between maps, and its game durations less even. Possibly.