Starcraft AI blog

GOAL

SSCAIT is seeing new bots from the GOAL project of the Technical University of Delft. They include AyyyLmao that appeared on a weekly broadcast and JEMMET. Possibly Adrian Mensing is another? At first none of them started, but now JEMMET appears to be running. I hope the secret will be passed around so more of these bots can get underway.

From the material, it seems that these are first year undergraduate students who are just learning AI and put the bots together in a 10 week course, so—expect not too much skill, but a lot of creativity. Should be fun.

The GOAL system I take to be a learning environment for agent programming. In these bots, each Starcraft unit is a separate agent that in principle makes its own decisions. It’s not what I would choose, but it’s a cool architecture. The agents do their thinking in Prolog, and talk to the game via a Java connector.

• The GOAL Agent Programming Language Home
• Multi-Agent Systems in StarCraft - PDF paper describing the setup

Antiga

Antiga is a Steamhammer 1.2.3 fork playing protoss. It looks as though has been recompiled, but any source changes to the original are probably minimal, because the .dll file size is the same in bytes (though the contents are not identical). But there are some curious builds listed in the configuration file.

The version I downloaded has its openings set like this (earlier versions played different openings, and I expect later versions will change again).

• versus terran - 13 nexus fast expansion
• versus protoss - the Stove
• versus zerg - the Stove
• versus random - 40% 10-12 gate, 60% dark templar rush

It is a very strange collection of builds. Except for 10-12 gate, they should lose quickly if the opponent goes for early aggression. The Stove is a wacky opening with scouts followed by dark templar—it’s not hard to defend, but it is a weird unit mix. The bot has a variety of other openings coded into its config file but not currently configured, including (by name): 10-12GateExpo, 3GateCore, 1GateExpo, 2GateGoon, 2BaseDT.