Starcraft AI blog

I submitted Steamhammer to AIIDE 2020, a day ahead of the deadline. I don’t believe in working right up to the limit and risking last-minute bugs, better to turn out a stable version. As it was I did suffer a late bug introduced by an attempted fix, but fortunately it was easy to detect: I knew something was wrong when I noticed 3 spawning pools and 2 spires in the base. It was caused by a tricky race condition, but when I looked back at my change, my familiarity with the code let me see the problem immediately, and I knew how to correct it. I ran long tests after that and found nothing more. The new behaviors have zero known bugs (so I expect to learn something!), though of course they have limitations.

I’m feeling a little paranoid because in double- and triple-checking I discovered a couple mistakes in my submission zip and had to correct them. One was carried over from last year—I had a wrong filename in one line of the README instructions. Luckily for last year, the instructions were clear enough anyway. Actually, triple-checking is an understatement. Some points I verified four times. I ought to feel secure that I got it right.

The version is 3.2.19. Everyone memorize that version number, there will be a quiz. The next step for me is to prepare the change list so I can post it on 1 October. It may take me that long to write it up.