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AIIDE 2017 results announced

AIIDE 2017 full results are out. I’ll discuss tomorrow. ZZZKBot came out on top with more cheese builds by learning which cheeses to play.

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krasi0 on :

That's the sad reality of today's BW AI scene - 1) incorporate cheese strats and you get to the top (e.g. ZZZK, Letabot) ; 2) get rid of the cheese strats and fall down (e.g. Letabot)

krasi0 on :

Ah, I have forgotten to mention the other shenanigan that very much helps you win a competition - conceal your work by not submitting until the very last moment of the deadline or do not upload for public distribution at all (e.g. ZZZK's author has been refusing to submit his new versions to SSCAIT).

Congratulations to PurpleWave and Iron. Those are the real winners in my eyes!
Also not sure how PurpleWave would have crashed (25 times!) the Broodwar process when it's running as a client. That needs to be investigated IMO.

LetaBot on :

Those crashes seem to indeed happen to other bots as well even though they use an external process. I guess it is something to do with how the tournament manager handles those bots.

Dave Churchill on :

The 'crash' column now includes bots that do not respond for 60 seconds or more, so client bots can now 'crash' even though they don't actually cause the Starcraft.exe to terminate. We can probably separate these two cases into two columns for clarification.

Crashes are up this yer, but crash rates for the re-submitted 2016 bots are almost identical, so I don't think it's a tournament issue.

PurpleWaveJadien on :

Addressing the topic of source code: I've read the source code of almost every available bot from the last few years. It's been incredibly informative. PurpleWave would be total junk if I weren't building off the ideas of people who came before me. I'm not clever enough to come up with all the ideas that people have previously had. I don't have the time to experiment and repeat all the mistakes that people have already made and learn from. My micro is structured like Iron Bot's. My macro is structured like Tscmoo's. My combat simulator is based on Hannes Bredberg's. My squad allocation uses a fast combat estimator based on AILien's. I couldn't get mineral locking working until I saw how McRave did his. Pylon power grids are funky and asymmetric; I understand them now because of Skynet. In pretty much all these cases, I tried to solve the same problems myself in a vacuum, and the solutions I came up with in isolation were far worse. And that doesn't mean copying/pasting code; I'm not even coding in the same language! It's about expanding your mind with approaches you hadn't considered, then trying to improve upon the work of others with your own creativity and effort.

krasi0 on :

Dan, that is a great reply! I appreciate it. Thanks!
In general, I am a huge open source user and proponent myself (main OS Linux years for 20 years now; I have been using professionally only open source IDEs, text editors, etc. since forever; I have contributed to multiple open source projects on GitHub and so on...).

That said, BWAI development as a hobby of mine (since '09) is kinda of an ego thing for me (wanting to become the next king of the hill all on my own) which I guess doesn't speak well of my character but everyone's got flaws, right? :D
Of course, that doesn't mean that I don't consult other bot developers from time to time online for opinions, known strategies and advice. For example, it was yesterday, I think, when I asked tscmoo and jaj22 on Twitch about the logic behind the valkyrie and vulture patrol micro.
But for now, I have forbidden myself to read / use other bots' source code. If one day, I hit a wall and reach my limits, I may do what you did, but for now I will go on fighting the uphill battle and see where this gets me :D
That's the awesome thing about the SSCAIT ladder - so many entries submitted, so many different styles and approaches to the toughest AI challenge in the most popular contemporary RTS game - BroodWar. And in the end, all we've got is the bloody arena with the starting 4 workers and 1 town hall for each player where we measure our smarts and endurance :)

Antiga / Iruian on :

I think it would really help the community to have a version of Krasi0 available as an open source project. Being in the top 1 or 2 for so long, there is a ton of information that could be used to improve other bots. I absolutely understand though for competitive reasons not doing it.

#begging, at very least swear on the dead body of Blizzard North that if you ever find SSCAIT / making the bot not interesting you release the bot to the public before you disappear into the internet ether time machine so that all that knowledge isn't lost. That's the truly scary part, having knowledge not build-able for future AI projects or lost.

krasi0 on :

Well, if I completely lose interest in developing my BW AI (unlikely) or the competitive scene dies completely (God forbid!), I am of course likely to release it as open source for the general good. :)
But there is also the curse of some (successful) open source projects which see some popularity and the end result is effectively burnout for the authors / maintainers. It's a huge responsibility, burden and sometimes a big headache. Just imagine how you often need to answer support requests (support work is tedious and time consuming on its own), everyone expects you to fix bugs quickly and for free. Additionally, the reality is that no one else is likely to step up as the next sole maintainer.
Then there are the shameless copycats who will just strip out your name as the author and publish the bot as their own without giving you any credit.
There are even more reasons that come to mind, but the above ones should be sufficient for now :)

Jay Scott on :

The way I think of it is that it is a matter of goals. In this AIIDE Steamhammer was surpassed by 3 of its forks, and UAlbertaBot by more of its forks. If you think that’s losing, maybe you should hold on to your source code, or release it a year later or something. If you think that’s winning....

Jay Scott on :

Note: I removed a few immoderate comments at the request of the commenters. Pretty nice community, very nearly self-policing.

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