Starcraft AI blog

Steamhammer crashed in the game Steamhammer-Middle School Strats. The game itself is not interesting. Middle School Strats is a rushbot, and Steamhammer had played it twice before, according to its game records. In the second game, Steamhammer misdiagnosed the opponent’s opening, so in this third game it played the wrong counter and got run over. Since Steamhammer crashed, it did not save a game record and will likely lose the fourth game in a similar way.

From the timing of the crash, it looks as though it was caused by the “impossible” bug that I recently fixed. The underlying crashing bug has been there since version 1.4.1 in April, and this is the first time it has manifested in public. I only discovered the crashing bug because I introduced another bug in my development version that brought about the infrequent conditions needed to trigger the crash!

Reliability is hard. Another bug is that Steamhammer’s reaction to having a mutalisk irradiated is broken—it has been broken since last year, and I still haven’t found the cause. An irradiated mutalisk is supposed to move away to save other zerg units. The code worked when written, and to my eye it looks as though it should still work, but somehow it has bitrotted—mutalisks don’t seem to react at all to being irradiated. How am I supposed to handle an interesting case like an irradiated ultralisk when I can’t handle an easy case?