Starcraft AI blog

How will the tournament go? I can’t predict the final results because they come out of an elimination phase, which is unpredictable by nature. It depends on pairings and luck. But I have some insight into the round robin phase. There are 78 participants, much more than the 45 last year, so each will play each other only once, giving the announced 6006 = 78 * 77 games. I haven’t seen it explained, but I suppose that the top 16 will go to the elimination phase, like last year.

How bots do in regular ladder play can be very different from how they will do in the tournament. The voters have a big influence. Steamhammer has been underrated lately on the ladder and will finish high in the round robin.

With Krasi0 choosing to stand out of the picture, the top favorites, of course, are Iron and McRave. Microwave has become steady and reliable and should also finish near the top; it even has a chance to finish #1, because it is not as big a target as Iron and McRave. And there are old standbys like Bereaver and like Killerbot by Marian Devecka.

Tscmoo random is being allowed to play, which I did not expect. As a random bot, it won’t be allowed into the elimination phase, but it will compete in the round robin. It was last updated in October and will probably finish out of the top ranks. But it would have had a good chance to make it into the elimination bracket if that were allowed by the rules.

CherryPi is a hard case to figure out. This version of CherryPi follows what is at heart a simple game plan: It wants to win with masses of zerglings (sometimes it falls back on winning with masses of hydralisks). It seems to have some ability to vary its plan by massing early, or saving up and massing more later. A casual watch of its games gives me the impression that it may be learning how to beat its opponents by varying its timing, but without a close study I’m not sure; maybe it’s something else. In any case, CherryPi’s initial results are mixed, with losses to weaker bots and wins against stronger ones. And in a single round robin, CherryPi won’t have any additional games to learn about opponents; it will have to rely on what it already knows.

Steamhammer I expect to finish out of the top 3 but likely between ranks 4 and 8. It should beat lower-ranked bots consistently and its only sure losses are against Iron and McRave, though of course it will lose some other games too. Microwave will probably win, but not definitely. I give Steamhammer a 75% chance against former nemesis CasiaBot because I hand-coded in a counter to CasiaBot’s hand-coded Steamhammer-countering opening. Steamhammer’s other nemesis TyrProtoss is not participating. The last couple games against Bereaver give the impression that Steamhammer can now go toe-to-toe against the protoss bot in the middle game, which it could not do before (Steamhammer won early or not at all). So the game against Bereaver is likely also a win.