Starcraft AI blog

The new bot Pineapple Cactus is named after a nice kind of cactus that grows in the Mojave Desert. If you think any cactus is nice, that is. For a brand new bot, it has a surprising variety of skills.

• Conduct fairly decent macro, especially later in the game.
• Expand everywhere if left alone too long.
• Make and use a variety of units, up to ultralisks.
• Defend a ramp or choke with sunkens.
• Cancel a building that is about to be destroyed.
• Separate injured mutalisks and send them home to recuperate.
• Recover after losing its main, rebuilding the tech elsewhere.

It also scouts the map with overlords in a careless way, so that the overlords die at a prodigious rate. The 45 minute long first game against terran turtle bot Johan Kayser shows all of these skills. Pineapple Cactus’s second game against Johan Kayser is its most successful game so far.

As I write, Pineapple Cactus has a score of 2 wins and 9 losses, and one of the wins is by crash. It has all those skills and it can barely make a dent in the opposition. 1. The bar is high: It’s tough to jump in with a new bot. 2. If you have weaknesses in basic skills, it doesn’t matter how many other skills you have.