Starcraft AI blog

Sorry, too tired today to do flocking. Here’s a rule proposal instead.

When a bot game goes too long, over an hour or an hour and a half with no winner, the game is stopped and automatically adjudicated by score. Pro games have the advantage of referees. When a pro game reaches a point where neither player can win, or where neither player is trying to win (they pause the game and talk to the players), the referees call it a draw and order a regame. When a technical problem interrupts a game, a pro game is either replayed or adjudicated a win for one player.

The main purpose of the pro rules is to guarantee a decisive result, which is entertaining for spectators and keeps the tournament system simple. Draws are rare; there are no cases in history of a regame also being drawn. The main purpose of the bot rules is to save time by stopping the game when the winning bot is confused and doesn’t know how to finish the enemy off, or takes too long to do it. Game timeouts are common. Both rule sets want a fair result too, of course.

I think we’ve come far enough that we can update the bot rules. The rules we use today are good for yesterday’s bots, not for today’s stronger bots.

I propose that when a game times out, it should be declared lost by both players. You draw, you lose. The better bots (half the table, I estimate) are fully capable of winning won games, and this push from the rules would encourage them to be aggressive and thorough about it. Fewer games will time out and tournaments will run faster overall.

Alternately, we could give each player 1/2 point for a draw, as in chess. Giving points for a draw offers the loser more reason to lift its command center and hide it and the winner less reason to be aggressive, but I don’t expect it would differ much overall from you-draw-you-lose.

Is it unfair to lose because you can’t win fast enough? It seems fair to me, if the timeout period is long enough, or is conditional on lack of progress by some measure (units destroyed, minerals mined, resources spent). Some individual results will be unfair, of course, as always when adjudicating games instead of finishing them. The current system also produces unfair results, where the side that would have won given more time is adjudicated the loser by current score—I’ve seen that happen a number of times, and it always bugs me. If both sides lost, I would feel the result less unfair.