Early prediction of the outcome of Starcraft Games

As a result of Antonio Álvarez Caballero master’s thesis, we’ll be presenting tomorrow at the IJCCI 2017 conference a poster on the early prediction of Starcraft games.
The basic idea behind this line of research is to try and find a model of the game so that we can do fast fitness evaluation of strategies without playing the whole game, which can take up to 60 minutes. That way, we can optimize those strategies in an evolutionary algorithm and find the best ones.
In our usual open science style, paper and data are available in a repository.
Our conclusions say that we might be able to pull that off, using k-nearest neighbor algorithm. But we might have to investigate a bit further if we really want to find a model that gives us some insight about what makes a strategy a winner.

Dark clouds allow early prediction of heavy rain in Funchal, near where IJCCI is taking place

StarCraft protagoniza la reunión semanal de 30/oct/2017

En la pasada reunión del grupo Geneura, Victor estuvo exponiendo al resto de asistentes el trabajo denominado Predicting the Winner in Two Player StarCraft Games que fue publicado en el congreso  CoSECiVi’15 por el profesor Antonio A. Sanchez-Ruiz.

El enlace a la presentación está en https://vrivas.github.io/explicando-sanchez-ruiz-2015/output/index.html

 

Starcraft GP nominated to the HUMIES award

This year we participated in the HUMIES awards with our paper «Towards Automatic StarCraft Strategy Generation Using Genetic Programming«, accepted at CIG2015, wrote in collaboration with Politecnico di Torino and INRA. Our paper was elected from 28 candidates to be part of the 8 finalists, so we can consider it a great achievement. Although we didn’t won, because the astounding quality of the other works, we are thrilled about our nomination :)

Here is the presentation. It even includes a reference to Starship Troopers!

Towards automatic StarCraft strategy generation using genetic programming

I forgot to mention that we published our paper «Towards automatic StarCraft strategy generation using genetic programming» in CIG 2015 conference, held in Taiwan. This was a work made in collaboration with Alberto Tonda (INRA) and Giovanni Squillero (Politecnico di Torino), starting a new research line using this game (and also, starting other nice collaborations that are still a secret!)

The abstract:

Among Real-Time Strategy games few titles have enjoyed the continued success of StarCraft. Many research lines aimed at developing Artificial Intelligences, or “bots”, capable of challenging human players, use StarCraft as a platform. Several characteristics make this game particularly appealing for researchers, such as: asymmetric balanced factions, considerable complexity of the technology trees, large number of units with unique features, and potential for optimization both at the strategical and tactical level. In literature, various works exploit evolutionary computation to optimize particular aspects of the game, from squad formation to map exploration; but so far, no evolutionary approach has been applied to the development of a complete strategy from scratch. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of StarCraftGP, a framework able to evolve a complete strategy for StarCraft, from the building plan, to the composition of squads, up to the set of rules that define the bot’s behavior during the game. The proposed approach generates strategies as C++ classes, that are then compiled and executed inside the OpprimoBot open-source framework. In a first set of runs, we demonstrate that StarCraftGP ultimately generates a competitive strategy for a Zerg bot, able to defeat several human-designed bots.

Do you want to know more? Download the paper draft or electronic version in IEEE web.