Starcraft AI blog

I got 2 nearly simultaneous comments pointing out Randomhammer’s loss on time against LetaBot by Martin Rooijackers. Thanks! Randomhammer was winning, so it hurt. The problem is the “my main is full, I can’t find a place to put this building” bug, which I reduced but did not solve. A typical solution seems to be to choose a new “main base” from time to time. I would like to go further and put a pylon at each base, if for no other reason than to add cannons if needed.

Maybe it’s a good time to talk about my bugs. I have 39 bugs—so far—that I want to fix in the next version, not counting bugs I’m intentionally skipping for now. It’s far more than I can actually fix. If I fixed all the bugs, I wouldn’t have time to add more bugs! One of the worst bugs was introduced in version 1.1 in February and is still there.

The good news is that there are no known crashing bugs. Steamhammer has 1 crash dump on SSCAIT since 3 April, and it points to initialization code before Steamhammer runs. UAlbertaBot was already mostly good in that respect, and the majority of crashing bugs I fixed (though not all) were in my own code.

The bad news is that most games, both wins and losses, show the effect of bugs. Many events that may look to observers like ordinary poor play are secretly due to incorrect information tracking, or behaviors occurring at times they weren’t intended to, or something else going wrong behind the scenes. In other words, if I can fix the worst of them, then Steamhammer will play much more strongly just by working as intended.

This game McRave-Steamhammer is a bug-fest on both sides. Watch this replay only if you can bear to see an epic number of things go wrong for both players. At the end of the game, Steamhammer is mining minerals with 1 drone and gas with 3, while its other 18 drones are trapped behind a map block, and that is only one of many painful blunders. McRave did no better. The game went on far too long as both bots tripped over their own feet.

Here is one of the most frustrating bugs: In my tests at home, Steamhammer defeated Killerbot by Marian Devecka nearly 100% of the time. Since being uploaded, Steamhammer has played 3 games against Killerbot and lost 2 of them due to a new bug that I had never seen before. I can’t find the bug in games against any other opponent. Objectively, a bug that affects only one opponent is not the top priority to solve....