Starcraft AI blog

Starcraft is hard, therefore bot coding is also hard. A bot needs complex behavior to play a reasonable game without too many gross blunders. Bot authors who start from scratch have a ton of work to do to catch up with the state of the art. I’m thinking of Sungguk Cha’s new terran bot, though I don’t know whether it was coded from scratch. It has a bunch of smart behaviors, but it is scoring poorly so far. It plays well in some ways, but to score well it has to play adequately in more ways yet.

I think the community understands the problem and has done a good job of reducing it. We have starter bots that people can modify (UAlbertaBot is popular, but most bots are open source), and frameworks and libraries that solve common problems (Atlantis, BWTA2, Igor Dimitrijevic’s terrain analysis BWEM, BWSAL, SparCraft and BOSS which are both included with UAlbertaBot). To get well underway in bot coding is still hard, but it’s not for lack of support from the community.

I’m hoping even more people will contribute reusables. If you think you have a good solution to a common problem, why not package it up as a library? It’s good coding practice to have a clear API between modules, so it could help you grow your bot. If the API is light enough, as it should be in good code, then coding the module as an independent library enforces a kind of cleanliness. Then you can distribute it separately to make it easier for others to use. With documentation, of course (that may be the hard part for a lot of people).

As I think about the right way to structure a bot, I keep returning to composable software ideas. For example, the blackboard architecture is an AI classic. (Nova claims to have a blackboard architecture.) Modules are relatively independent of each other because they share data only through the blackboard; it’s easy for different people to work on different modules at the same time; it’s easy to add or replace modules. If it’s done right, it’s even easy to pull out a selection of the blackboard modules and reuse them in another bot that maybe has a different overall architecture. Maybe a modular idea along those lines would help.