Starcraft AI blog

Yesterday I watched a pro ZvZ game from 2010 where the winner played an opening I had not seen before. “Hmm, does that have good timings against overpool?” I thought. It seems to be a rare opening and is not documented on Liquipedia, but I coded up a version and tested it out. The scores are Steamhammer 1.2.2 set to play one fixed opening, versus each opponent.

Holy Saint Isidore, Batman! Bots are not prepared for this!

Killerbot scored 1 win when Steamhammer made a tactical mistake of a kind that I intend to fix in the upcoming version. Microwave was able to exploit a risk inherent to the opening—once. Zia tried its builds one after another and lost with all of them. Ailien’s machine learning came the closest to finding an answer; it tried different tacks, and a few of the games were fierce. By the end of the match it seemed to be grasping at straws: Do hydras work? No! Do lurkers work? No! Every fixed opening has counterbuilds, and a human player who knew what was coming would find it easy to beat. It is possible that the counterbuilds are outside Ailien’s gamut, or take over 15 games to find. The release version of Steamhammer itself put up the strongest fight but was forced down.

Of course Steamhammer does not play fixed openings outside of tests like this. I think that adding the new opening to its repertoire is likely to make Steamhammer impervious for a long time to machine learning attacks on its openings.

I’ll be holding my secret weapon in reserve until version 1.2.3 comes out. Everything will be published then, but I also enjoy springing surprises. This will change the meta, and I would like to be 2 steps ahead.