looking ahead to AIST S3
AIST S3 is coming up fast, with play to start on 1 March. As I expected, I did not register Steamhammer (the proxy skills are looking fun, though). Events coincided to leave me extremely busy over the last ten days or so.
Here are the registered players. I sorted them by BASIL elo, so we can take the table as a first guess at the likely winners. Of course participants are likely to have special tournament updates, so it’s only a guess.
| race | bot | elo |
|---|---|---|
| protoss | PurpleWave | 2878 |
| protoss | Locutus | 2805 |
| zerg | Microwave | 2624 |
| protoss | BananaBrain | 2610 |
| terran | Dragon | 2483 |
| terran | WillyT | 2358 |
| terran | LetaBot | 2255 |
| zerg | McRave | 2153 |
McRave chooses to participate as zerg, which is interesting—first, that he chose to play, and second, that he chose to play offrace. The sensational news is that LetaBot signed up! That implies that LetaBot is updated to BWAPI 4.4.0, and suggests that the long-awaited bug fixing work may be complete. If so, this version of LetaBot may be much stronger than the BASIL elo of the old version indicates. I’m looking forward!
As usual in recent years, protoss is on top, terran struggles, and zerg is scattered around. We’ll see whether the tournament results agree with that.
8 is a power of 2, so 8 players are a good number for an elimination tournament. AIST S1 had 5 players and S2 had 10, so byes had to be inserted into the pairings. None of that should be needed this time.
The maps for S3 are (2)Overwatch, (2)Tres Pass, (3)Power Bond, (4)Circuit Breaker, (4)Fighting Spirit, and (4)Gladiator. I linked the unfamiliar maps; bots have played on the others before and should be ready. None of the maps has difficult features that call for special-case coding, which must be a relief to participants. The strangest feature is that Tres Pass has a short air distance between the 2 bases and a long ground distance, which is not so strange at all. Power Bond does have a neutral command center on the center platform, which zerg could purloin with a queen (and land elsewhere to make infested terrans), but I doubt either zerg has the skills.
Since Steamhammer is not playing, may the second best bot win!
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McRave on :
Jay Scott on :
MicroDK on :
Jay Scott on :
Dan on :
MarcoDBAA on :
Sure, tournaments, where bots play each other 100 times each are "unwatchable", but it should be Bo5 at least. Especially if you only have 8 competitors.
Will the games be uploaded? Also uploaded in a way, where suspense is not killed (like "Bot X is the winner, and here are the replays")?
Dan on :
MarcoDBAA on :
Generally you could say, that luck and stealth (hiding your bots strats before a tournament) also becomes more important in shorter series.
Sure, humans play Bo3s, but they are more adaptable on the fly, they get tired, organisers need their tournament to be profitable (rent an arena, tournament cannot go on forever).
And there are human vs human tournaments, where Bo5s are also used in early rounds (if emulation is important). Just the first one I found here: https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/ESL_Pro_Tour/2020/21/Masters/Leipzig/Playoffs
Well, just think, that it definitely makes more sense to use Bo5s.
Not saying, that I won´t watch it, if it is a Bo3, if there is suspense (means not getting told who won beforehand).
MicroDK on :