Skynet meets the Swarm: how the Berkeley Overmind won the 2010 StarCraft AI competiti
Neat article about how Starcraft is helping research into AI
Quote:
Feature: Skynet meets the Swarm: how the Berkeley Overmind won the 2010 StarCraft AI competition via Ars Technica by editors@arstechnica.com (Ars Staff) on 1/18/11
We’re gathered in a conference room on the Berkeley campus, the detritus of a LAN party scattered around us. The table is covered with computers and pizza, and there’s a game of StarCraft projected on the screen. Oriol Vinyals, a PhD student in computer science, is commanding the Terran army in a life-or-death battle against the forces of the Zerg Swarm.
Oriol is very good—one-time World Cyber Games competitor, number 1 in Spain, top 16 in Europe good. But his situation now is precarious: his goliath walkers are holding off the Zerg’s flying mutalisks, but they can’t be everywhere at once. The Zerg player is crafty, retreating in the face of superior firepower but never going far, picking off targets of opportunity and applying constant pressure.
Then Oriol makes a mistake. He moves his goliaths slightly out of position, just for a few seconds. It’s enough. The mutalisks react instantly, streaming through the gap in his defenses and making straight for his vulnerable workers. By the time Oriol brings the goliaths back to drive off the mutalisks, his workers are wiped out and his resource production crippled.
Oriol makes a desperate, last-ditch attack on the Zerg base, trying to break through before the mutalisks are reinforced, but it’s too late. One after another, his goliaths get ripped apart by the Zerg defenses. As a new wave of mutalisks emerges from the Zerg hatcheries, he has no choice but to concede—to the computerized AI that just defeated him.
When is he porting it over to SC2? I'm tired of the very hard/insane computers cheating (gathering more minerals than is possible) because that's the only way to get a leg up on human players.
Several years ago I did an AI programming seminar using an API called Robocode (you program an autonomous tank that has movement, a gun and a radar). The guy leading the workshop threw his bot into the tournament, and it used potential field control ("anti-gravity") to dictate it's motion. It consistently was the second last bot to die, and that's because it didn't have a gun.
When is he porting it over to SC2? I'm tired of the very hard/insane computers cheating (gathering more minerals than is possible) because that's the only way to get a leg up on human players.
Starcraft was released in 1998... this will likely be available as an opponent in 2011. SC2 was released in 2010, so I'm guessing 2023?
When is he porting it over to SC2? I'm tired of the very hard/insane computers cheating (gathering more minerals than is possible) because that's the only way to get a leg up on human players.
I dislike that about sc2, they couldnt be bothered to make the computer smarter, so they gave them a ridiculous leg up.
The only way to beat the insane cpu is to cannon their base right off the bat.
Skynet meets the Swarm: how the Berkeley Overmind won the 2010 StarCraft AI competiti
