Starcraft AI blog

NLPRbot is cpac by Qiyue Yin. I don’t know, but I have to suspect that it is the same version of cpac that is playing in AIIDE 2017.

It is a fork of Steamhammer. The configuration file has been incorporated into the .dll, but it still tells what is going on. Versus terran, it plays Steamhammer’s 11Gas10PoolLurker opening 90% of the time, and a couple other openings the rest (a sensible choice). I couldn’t see any difference between its lurker micro and Steamhammer’s. Versus zerg it plays a half dozen openings, the openings that Steamhammer plays most often. Versus protoss and random it plays even more similarly to Steamhammer.

It has fixed opponent-specific openings named like this, in the order listed. The opponent names are the same as in AIIDE, and some are different than names on SSCAIT.

I’m not sure why Aiur and Xelnaga rated special counters. The ordinary opening mix should beat them reliably.

I didn’t dig into the dll in detail, but I do see additions that look like tracking unit types and keeping feature vectors. It looks like there are extensive changes to the zerg strategy boss; possibly a learning algorithm has been plugged in. In one game I noticed different scouting behavior. Most of the time it plays like Steamhammer.

As far as the configuration itself goes, though, NLPRbot strikes me as a mildly obfuscated fork of Steamhammer 1.3, configured for maximum wins with minimum effort from the author. I don’t know any reason other than obfuscation to rename it from cpac to NLPRbot. Maybe the author wants it to look like an unrelated bot? Maybe somebody other than the author posted it? On the AIIDE roster, Qiyue Yin is listed as “Independent”, so it’s apparently not an institutional thing.

In any case, NLPRbot aka cpac seems successful so far, even scoring a win over Krasi0. With Steamhammer skills plus hand configuration plus strategy improvements, it should be a dangerous opponent.