Starcraft AI blog

First, an aside: The original CIG 2019 tournament web site (https://cilab.sejong.ac.kr/sc_competition2019/) is gone. Presumably there is a new one with the results. Did they change the name to CoG? It’s confusing, and I don’t have time to dig through it myself as usual; it’s not a priority. Who can tell me?

The AIIDE 2019 list of registered participants arrived in my e-mail today. That’s my priority, and I do have time for it. There are 26 bots altogether, 21 registered players and five held over from last year.

The holdover bots from last year are #1 SAIDA, #3 CSE, #6 Iron, #9 ZZZKBot, and #17 UAlbertaBot (ranks from last year’s tournament). Since they are unchanged from last year, top competitors will be ready for them. In particular, this version of SAIDA is strong in regular play but vulnerable to a number of known exploits. I expect SAIDA to finish in the middle, losing most games to the top protoss bots and to Steamhammer and Microwave among the zergs. CSE and ZZZKBot may possibly be more robust. UAlbertaBot is much weaker and risks falling out of the tournament this year, not being held over for another year.

Twelve bots are familiar from past tournaments. Over half of them are protoss, with only two terrans and three zergs. The favorites are the protoss death squad of Locutus, McRave, and PurpleWave, and possibly Dragon, plus terran XiaoYi from the newcomer bots in the next table. Don’t miss that Dragon is listed as playing protoss, not terran as on SSCAIT. I expect BananaBrain, DaQin, LetaBot, MetaBot, Microwave, and Steamhammer to stand in the middle. CDBot and Stormbreaker have come out on the lower end in past tournaments.

Nine bots are new to me. That’s an ample supply of newcomers; almost as many as the updated returning competitors. It’s interesting that only two are protoss, although this is a protoss age—the race distribution of newcomers is fairly even, trending toward terran.

BunkerBoxeR, whose name refers to BoxeR the terran bonjwa, is on github and comes with a handy text explanation of its strategy: A bunker rush—and not a trivial one, but one that adapts to the situation.

Taeyoung Kim is the name of the former professional Starcraft II zerg Freaky. Surely it’s not the same person?

Protoss Murph by Francisco Javier Sacido is by the same author as terran Ecgberht.

Ophelia is on github. It is written in Lua. The available code is brief, despite recent commits. It does not give me the impression of a complete bot—for example, the file micro.lua contains no code.

XiaoYi is the Chinese name of a company that in English is called YI Technology. The bot scored highly in the CIG tournament—and that’s all I know about it. Perhaps they repurpose some cool computer vision algorithms?