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Man vs Bot

A lot of interesting bots were submitted to the StarCraft AI Competition. However, even the best could not beat an expert human player. But what about amateur players? Kotaku claimed that most casual StarCraft players would be unable to defeat the bots. The goal of this post is to test that claim. To do so, I played against […]

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StarCraft AI Competition Results

The AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition has come to a close. The challenge given to competitors was to build the best performing bot for an immensely popular, commercial game. The competition consisted of four tournaments of varying complexity. This was the first year the competition was held and it turned out to be a success. Even though no […]

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Rise of the Beta

My dissertation work aims to build intelligent game AI by learning from replays. However, the major limitation of this approach is that the AI cannot be developed until a large number of players have first played the game. Fortunately, large-scale beta testing is becoming more popular for games. These beta cycles result in mountains of data that can be used to build AI for games. One of the most notorious beta releases is Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft 2, which ran from February 17 to June 7. The only AI provided with this release was “very easy”, which means that Blizzard may be analyzing how players actually play the game before finalizing the AI.

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Starcraft EISbot in GamePro

Continuing the EIS blog’s recent Starcraft theme, Ben and Peter were recently interviewed by John Davison, editor of Gamepro, inspired after his visit to UCSC. The interview is now up on the front-page of Gamepro.com, with Davison tweeting: “Mind blown.”

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EISBot Shows Potential Versus Human Players

I developed a version of EISBot that plays a specific strategy, known as a 10-15 gate rush. The build was recently made famous by Nony. It is a Protoss build with the goal of harassing your opponent with ranged units as fast as possible and is most commonly used against Terran opponents. This strategy requires […]

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StarCraft AI at Super Happy Dev House

I attended Super Happy Dev House 36 and presented a lightening talk about the upcoming AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition. The competition is interesting to the hacker community at Super Happy Dev House, because the Broodwar API enabling the competition is a reverse engineering project providing direct access to game state and units in StarCraft. […]

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