new bot BetaStar
Based on its authors, BetaStar looks to be associated with China’s State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology (page in Chinese) at Nanjing University; it is sometimes translated as “National Key Laboratory” instead. Here are a couple papers that seem to be from the same research group that produced it. They are both about Starcraft II.
• On Reinforcement Learning for Full-length Game of StarCraft (September 2018)
• Efficient Reinforcement Learning with a Mind-Game for Full-Length StarCraft II (March 2019; by “mind game” they mean a simplified abstract version of the real game)
The papers have similar titles, but the contents are different. The first is about hierarchical reinforcement learning for macro action choices; the second builds on it with the “mind game” to make learning faster and more effective.
I did not find information about how BetaStar is related to this past research. Presumably a new research paper is in preparation, or published somewhere I did not look. Included in the binary are 3 files with the air of learned data, less than 1M each in size, named pvp_params.csv
, pvt_params.csv
, and pvz_params.csv
. If BetaStar uses the methods of the research papers above, then these will be data for choosing macro actions—what to build next, what to research, etc.
BetaStar is derived from CSE. The line of descent is UAlbertaBot > Steamhammer > Locutus > CSE > BetaStar. It has strong inherited skills. CSE finished #3 in AIIDE 2018, ahead of Locutus. I could not figure out where the name BetaStar comes from. In this context, it sounds like an algorithm name, but if so I guess it is a new algorithm.
So I found a bunch of clues about BetaStar, but I don’t actually know a thing about how it works! It finished #9 in the CoG tournament (formerly CIG), with a 59.04% win rate, ahead of MetaBot and behind ZZZKBot. As I write, it has the BASIL elo of 2314, which is above average but well below the top; it is ranked #31 out of 83 active bots, between Arrakhammer and TyrProtoss. It has 55 wins, 23 losses, and—this is the amazing part—49 crashes. It often fails to start games at all. Its basic play is quite strong, with Locutus dragoon micro and other skills. So far, between SSCAIT and BASIL, Steamhammer has several losses and only 1 win against it. BetaStar scored 2-0 versus #3 PurpleWave on BASIL. But besides crashing, BetaStar has play bugs that other bots do not: It likes to build 2 cybernetics cores. It sometimes plays an unsafe opening and loses to a rush, then repeats the opening against the same opponent and loses the same way (see vs legacy 1 and vs legacy 2—#50 legacy is 3-0 versus BetaStar). It seems that BetaStar has both great strengths and great weaknesses.
Without much to go on, I nevertheless read BetaStar as similar to past Chinese research projects I’ve looked into: It is meant to be a one-off project to demonstrate a specific research goal, and aspects outside the goal were afforded no more effort than absolutely needed; solving crashes was not part of the goal. If so, it may have a successor next year in the same way that it succeeded CSE, but I don’t expect updates in the meantime.
It’s good to have a new bot! They have been few lately.