Starcraft AI blog

I’ll cover Microwave over two days because it writes two files for each opponent, a “results” file giving wins/losses for each strategy and a “history” file of more detailed game records. Each summary is bulky in itself, and I don’t want to pile them up. The history file has all the information in the results file and more. In fact, a quick look at Microwave’s code says that it no longer reads the results file at all, but reconstructs its contents from the history file each game. But different presentations of the data have value in themselves; this view makes it easy to read across the columns and see where a given opening was effective.

Today is the results file, the table of strategies versus each opponent. Wow, that’s a lot of opening builds! I count 73, less than half as many as Steamhammer but still too large a number to explore in a tournament of 150 rounds. I think only bots with combinatorial strategies have more. The numbers include not only games played during the tournament, but also Microwave’s prepared data for each opponent, so they add up to more than 150 games versus each opponent. You can compare the overall win rates per opponent to see which ones Microwave was more successful against in training as opposed to in the tournament—it may indicate whether the opponent was updated for the tournament and became stronger than Microwave expected. In general, for stronger opponents training data overestimated Microwave’s success, while for weaker opponents it was the opposite (that is, the training uncovered mistakes that Microwave could then avoid).

Microwave explored widely against top opponents, and concentrated efficiently on a few winning openings against weaker ones. On the other hand, although there is a flag in the configuration file named PlayGoodStrategiesFirst (turned on), Microwave seems to have little idea which strategies are most likely to work. Versus DaQin, 1 hatch mutalisk and 3 hatch mutalisk are successful, but the most natural 2 hatch muta is never tried. Of course that’s a widespread weakness among bots.

The 3 hatch muta strategies were relatively successful overall. That’s interesting.