Table of Contents

CIG 2011

CIG 2011 StarCraft RTS AI Competition

We have a winner (see details below under results)!

The tournament was won by Skynet (Andrew Smith), followed by UAlbertaBot (David Churchill) on 2nd and Xelnaga (Ho-Chul Cho and Kyung-Joong Kim) on 3rd place. Congratulations!

competition2011-banner.jpg

Realtime Strategy (RTS) games are one of the major computer game genres and one of the few for which AI-based players (bots) have little chance to win against expert human players — if they are not allowed to cheat. We presume that competitions as this one will help to improve AI development in the RTS genre. StarCraft (by Blizzard) is one of the most popular RTS games of all time, is known to be extremely well balanced, and thus is an ideal candidate to test different AI approaches.

This competition is part of the Computational Intelligence in Games conference 2011. This year, we have two tracks, please let us know where you intend to start (of course you can do both).

Track A is the full game with free choice of race as also used for the The 2nd Annual AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition.
Track B is the reduced game (only terran, constrained unit choice) as used last year

For both tracks we will hold round-robin tournaments with 10 games per match and fixed time limit of 1h (to prevent endless games after resources are used up) after which the built-in StarCraft score decides the winner. The bot with the highest overall number of single-game victories is the winner of the track. See below for more info.

A PDF competition poster is here.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: August 15, 2011
Conference: August 31 - September 3, 2011

Tournament is finished, see results below.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know via mail starcraft@ls11.cs.tu-dortmund.de.

Submitted Bots

(see an extended description of the bots here:)

Track A
Bot Name Main Contributor Institution Bot Race Web Link
BroodwarBotQGabriel Synnaeve E-Motion team at INRIA Rhône-Alpes (LIG) / University of GrenobleProtoss http://emotion.inrialpes.fr/people/synnaeve
BTHAIJohan HagelbäckBlekinge Institute of TechnologyZerghttp://code.google.com/p/bthai/
AIURFlorian RichouxUniversity of TokyoProtoss http://code.google.com/p/aiurproject/
LSAIDouglas PattiLafayette CollegeZerghttp://cs.lafayette.edu/~taylorm
EvoBotYujing HuUniversity of NanjingTerran
Protoss Beast JellyJoshua DongWestwood High SchoolProtosshttp://wwbwai.sourceforge.net/
XelnagaHo-Chul ChoSejong UniversityProtoss
SkynetAndrew SmithfreelancerProtosshttp://code.google.com/p/skynetbot/
NovaAlberto UriarteIIIA-Spanish National Research CouncilTerranhttp://nova.wolfwork.com/
UAlbertaBotDavid ChurchillUniversity of Alberta, CanadaProtosshttp://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~cdavid/

Tournament is finished, see below for results.

Track B
Bot Name Main Contributor Institution Web Link
BTHAIJohan HagelbäckBlekinge Institute of Technologyhttp://code.google.com/p/bthai/

Unfortunately we have received only one submission for Track B. We therefore decided to cancel the track. Johan, we are very sorry.

Results

As all games have been played manually, we decided to set up 2 brackets with 5 bots each on a random basis. From each bracket, the 2 best bots make it into the final round (counting the number of wins, and evaluating the direct encounters only in case of equal wins). To compensate for slight hardware differences, each pair has played two games (one on each of the two employed machines), and this has been repeated for all 5 maps used in the first round. We are aware the fact that the split into two groups is not entirely fair (as seen for the example of AIUR who won more games than the 2nd bot in the other bracket) but had to reduce the number of overall played games.

Bracket A
Crashes Games Bot Wins
0 40 UAlbertaBot 33
1 40 Skynet 31
2 40 AIUR 24
1 40 Nova 8
0 40 LSAI 4

Qualified for the final round: UAlbertaBot and Skynet.

Bracket B
Crashes Games Bot Wins
12 40 Xelnaga 25
3 40 BroodwarBotQ 23
0 40 BTHAI 23
17 40 Protoss Beast Jelly 17
0 40 EvoBot 12

As BroodwarBotQ and BTHAI have the same number of wins, their direct encounter is evaluated which accounted 6 : 4 for the BroodwarBotQ.

Qualified for the final round: Xelnaga and BroodwarBotQ. Note that all qualified bots play Protoss.
Maps used for the first round: (2)MatchPoint 1.3, (4)Fighting Spirit 1.3, iCCupdestination 1.1, iCCup gaia, iCCup great barrier reef

Final Round

The final round was played in a similar mode as each of the first round brackets, using another set of 5 maps (see below), resulting in 30 games for each bot.

Crashes Games Bot Wins
0 30 Skynet 26
0 30 UAlbertaBot 22
3 30 Xelnaga 11
2 30 BroodwarBotQ 1

This makes Skynet (Andrew Smith) the clear winner, followed by UAlbertaBot (David Churchill) on 2nd and Xelnaga (Ho-Chul Cho and Kyung-Joong Kim) on 3rd place. Congratulations!

Maps used in the final round: iCCup lost temple 2.4, iCCup rush hour 3.1, iCCup swordinthemoon2.1, iCCup yellow 1.1, La_Mancha1.1

Result Presentations

These presentations have been given by Mike and Tobias at CIG 2011 in Seoul on September 2, the first round at 9:20 AM, the final round at 14:25 PM. Powerpoint and PDF have the same contents, but the sound is only included in the Powerpoint slides.

First round Powerpoint / First round PDF

Final round Powerpoint / Final round PDF

We will most likely hold a similar tournament next year again (however, there may be slight rule changes), so you are invited to prepare your bots. In this case, you may follow these instructions:

Getting Started

The competition will use StarCraft Brood War 1.16.1. You must possess a legal copy of the game.

Bots for StarCraft shall use the Broodwar API, which provides hooks into StarCraft and enables the development of custom AI for StarCraft. Interfaces in many languages are available to query the current state of the game and issue orders to units. Note that due to an important bug release we decided to use BWAPI 3.6.1 as also employed for the AIIDE tournament. bwapi3.jpg

Rules

Specific (tentative) ruleset for track A (this is largely identical to the AIIDE ruleset).
Specific ruleset for this track B of the competition (nearly unchanged from last year).
Baseline (tentative) ruleset (the same as for the AIIDE competition, it basically defines what misbehavior of a bot is that would lead to disqualification).

We will largely use a pool of maps widely used for internet gaming, as e.g. the maps of the International Cyber Cup, thus we recommend using some of these also for training your bots.

The 2nd Annual AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition

Organizing Committee

Tobias Mahlmann, IT University Copenhagen
Mike Preuss, Technische Universität Dortmund

For any comments or inquiries, please write to starcraft@ls11.cs.tu-dortmund.de

StarCraft®: Brood War®
Used with permission granted to CIG. Blizzard has consented to run the competition via the Broodwar API interface, which uses a back door of the game and is not in any form related to Blizzard. Thanks!

©1998 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. StarCraft, Brood War and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.