Starcraft AI blog

Here’s what I learned in analyzing Skynet.

Skynet’s skills come across to me as first drafts of what you’d really want to implement. In looking at each one, it’s easy to see points that could be improved and shortcuts that were taken to get it working more easily. On the other hand, Skynet has a lot of different skills; the shortcuts paid off in time saved.

In other words, Andrew Smith put priority on breadth of skills rather than depth of skills. And it’s hard to argue with his choice, because Skynet is a great success, still a strong and interesting bot though its last update was in 2013.

I think it’s a key point. In a lot of posts I point out, “a better way to do X would be....” But you should only care if X is a weak point in your bot. It is better to play adequately in all respects than to play well in some and poorly in others. You want to minimize your worst weaknesses.

If you’re perfect at choosing the right unit mix to counter your opponent but your micro sucks, you lose. If you’re perfect at micro but you choose a stupid unit mix, you lose. Better to be fair-to-middling at both. Breadth of skills first.

You may be able to lift code from Skynet for your own bot, if you don’t mind being infected by its GPL license. You’ll probably have to do a bit of adapting to fit it into your own framework, but the code has clear interfaces and the important working parts seem mostly independent of the rest of the program. Once you’ve seen an idea it shouldn’t be too hard to reimplement it, either.