Starcraft AI blog

The AIIDE 2020 registration deadline was yesterday, and today the list of participants is out (though as I write I don’t see an update to the web site yet). I wrote up the new map pool earlier.

First, the familiar names.

Stardust crushed CoG and is at the head of the BASIL ladder; it is of course the favorite to win #1. McRave is playing zerg again, as in CoG. I’m hoping that Dragon will show us something new. For the other bots, I feel that I know more or less what to expect.

Then the new entrants that have not competed in AIIDE before.

I think “Kim Tae-Young” is a more standard way to anglicize the Korean name. DanDanBot registered last year too, but ended up not competing. The name “Wang Bin” also looks somehow familiar, though I don’t see a past mention related to Starcraft. It is possible that the second author of this recent paper Triple-GAIL: A Multi-Modal Imitation Learning Framework with Generative Adversarial Nets is the same person, but the name is common (at least as anglicized), so I can’t be sure.

Unknown bots are unknown. Let’s hope some of them are fun!

Plus 2 holdovers from last year.

DaQin first competed in AIIDE in 2018. UAlbertaBot is of course the perennial benchmark, though it risks landing in last place (last year it finished third to last, ahead of newcomers AITP and BunkerBoxeR).

I count 15 participants in total, 4 terran, 6 protoss, 4 zerg, 1 random. That’s a relatively even balance; protoss domination is not showing much. It is “traditional” for some participants to drop out before the tournament gets under way, so we’ll see how that goes. Last year half of AIIDE dropped out. Let’s hope there is no such trouble this year.