Starcraft AI blog

This rule of thumb occurred to me: Every strategy or tactic that requires specific knowledge to defeat, is likely to beat many bots.

If you don’t know how to fight carriers, then carriers beat you, and XIMP knows it. If you don’t know how to fight lurkers, then lurkers beat you. If you don’t have specific knowledge of dark templar, zergling rushes, or cannon rushes, then they’ll beat you.

“If you see an enemy structure in your base, kill it now even if you have to pull workers” is general knowledge and stops all kinds of proxies that are scouted, including cannon rushes. But if the cannons come up, to work around them or fight them you need specific knowledge of that situation.

Bots start out ignorant and adding knowledge is hard, so each bot tends to have only the knowledge that its author thinks crucial. So if you know any trick or tactic (no matter how crude and noobish) that you can defeat only with specific knowledge (no matter how little or how simple), then why not try it? Maybe your bot will be the next Stone, which had a frivolous strategy but a top score.

Tomorrow: Give your goals priorities.