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SSCAIT Ladder Tournament series

For anyone who hasn’t noticed, the second weekly SSCAIT Ladder Tournament is underway. Here’s the tournament series main page so you can follow along as more of these little competitions come up.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go do something to prevent the zerg column in the tournament participant tables from growing even longer. 6 of the 13 bots this week are zerg and share common heritage in their family trees. Tonight I’m implementing stim for terrans. Steamhammer’s terran infantry skills are almost good enough to pose a serious threat to zergs—just a couple more skills....

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krasi0 on :

Yeah, from a quality-Zerg-bots draught in the past, we've gone to the other extreme - too many SH/UB alike Zerg participants occupying top spots which is generally a good thing. Introducing a few representatives of the other two races would be a refresher. :)

Which leads me to the second point: I have been wondering lately about what restrictions to put on minimum child diversity from a parent in order to prevent flooding the server with 98+% same DNA bots being submitted by different authors.
For example, 5 Pool by Muukzor is probably 95% or more the same as SH, but at least it has something unique in it which is also significant: the BO + some behaviour tweaks were the first of their kind. So everyone feels like it deserves its place there. OTOH, Bftjoe's submission is more like 99.95% the same as SH with just a few BOs removed? I am no expert in SH heritage so please excuse me if those percentages seem far off. They have been purely based on my personal observations.
IMO, It'd be a good thing to raise some public awareness about this particular matter and come up with a decent solution on how to keep things in check. Perhaps a separate blog post on the topic is warranted? What are your thoughts?

PurpleWaveJadien on :

I think part of the problem is that because UAB's style is a bit one dimensional -- make army, smash face, retreat -- it's hard to make iterative changes and wind up with a result that's strikingly different. SparCraft in particular seems like a barrier to development; you can tweak the parameters or improve the calculations (Joe has been doing a lot of that) but the end result is still a linear smash face/retreat behavior.

Joseph Huang on :

My bot attempts to macro a lot harder than Steamhammer, but it makes it lose due to lack of static defense and other issues. I plan on fixing these, it should play a lot differently than SH when I am done.

PurpleWaveJadien on :

On the one hand, I know Joe is very actively working on his fork: https://github.com/bftjoe/bftjoe-bot/commits/master -- but on the other hand the nature of the changes are very iterative, so the end result is that I can't tell Steamhammer/bftjoe/Microwave apart.

PurpleWaveJadien on :

AILien is the most distinctive recent UAB fork, but getting there required Xilmi to rip out both SparCraft and BOSS, which is no small effort. All of which is to say, I have nothing resembling a solution, but you can be an active, well-intended author and still produce a Steamhammer fork that's almost indistinguishable from the original.

krasi0 on :

At this point, I consider Xilmi a totally different bot, more on the level of SH. It has diverged significantly

Ail on :

Had I expected to be in the tournament, I would not have let this weak experimental 1-build version play. :o

krasi0 on :

People voted for you, Xilmi! You are popular! ;)

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