A Bayesian Model for Plan Recognition in RTS Games applied to StarCraft

The task of keyhole (unobtrusive) plan recognition is central to adaptive game AI. "Tech trees" or "build trees" are the core of real-time strategy (RTS) game strategic (long term) planning. This paper presents a generic and simple Bayesian model for RTS build tree prediction from noisy observations, which parameters are learned from replays (game logs). This unsupervised machine learning approach involves minimal work for the game developers as it leverage players' data (com- mon in RTS). We applied it to StarCraft1 and showed that it yields high quality and robust predictions, that can feed an adaptive AI.Comment: 7 pages; Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE 2011), Palo Alto : \'Etats-Unis (2011

A Bayesian Model for Plan Recognition in RTS Games applied to StarCraft

7 pagesInternational audienceThe task of keyhole (unobtrusive) plan recognition is central to adaptive game AI. "Tech trees" or "build trees" are the core of real-time strategy (RTS) game strategic (long term) planning. This paper presents a generic and simple Bayesian model for RTS build tree prediction from noisy observations, which parameters are learned from replays (game logs). This unsupervised machine learning approach involves minimal work for the game developers as it leverage players' data (com- mon in RTS). We applied it to StarCraft1 and showed that it yields high quality and robust predictions, that can feed an adaptive AI

MSC: A Dataset for Macro-Management in StarCraft II

Macro-management is an important problem in StarCraft, which has been studied for a long time. Various datasets together with assorted methods have been proposed in the last few years. But these datasets have some defects for boosting the academic and industrial research: 1) There're neither standard preprocessing, parsing and feature extraction procedures nor predefined training, validation and test set in some datasets. 2) Some datasets are only specified for certain tasks in macro-management. 3) Some datasets are either too small or don't have enough labeled data for modern machine learning algorithms such as deep neural networks. So most previous methods are trained with various features, evaluated on different test sets from the same or different datasets, making it difficult to be compared directly. To boost the research of macro-management in StarCraft, we release a new dataset MSC based on the platform SC2LE. MSC consists of well-designed feature vectors, pre-defined high-level actions and final result of each match. We also split MSC into training, validation and test set for the convenience of evaluation and comparison. Besides the dataset, we propose a baseline model and present initial baseline results for global state evaluation and build order prediction, which are two of the key tasks in macro-management. Various downstream tasks and analyses of the dataset are also described for the sake of research on macro-management in StarCraft II. Homepage: https://github.com/wuhuikai/MSC.Comment: Homepage: https://github.com/wuhuikai/MS

Learning macromanagement in starcraft from replays using deep learning

The real-time strategy game StarCraft has proven to be a challenging environment for artificial intelligence techniques, and as a result, current state-of-the-art solutions consist of numerous hand-crafted modules. In this paper, we show how macromanagement decisions in StarCraft can be learned directly from game replays using deep learning. Neural networks are trained on 789,571 state-action pairs extracted from 2,005 replays of highly skilled players, achieving top-1 and top-3 error rates of 54.6% and 22.9% in predicting the next build action. By integrating the trained network into UAlbertaBot, an open source StarCraft bot, the system can significantly outperform the game's built-in Terran bot, and play competitively against UAlbertaBot with a fixed rush strategy. To our knowledge, this is the first time macromanagement tasks are learned directly from replays in StarCraft. While the best hand-crafted strategies are still the state-of-the-art, the deep network approach is able to express a wide range of different strategies and thus improving the network's performance further with deep reinforcement learning is an immediately promising avenue for future research. Ultimately this approach could lead to strong StarCraft bots that are less reliant on hard-coded strategies.Comment: 8 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2017

Online Build-Order Optimization for Real-Time Strategy Agents Using Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms

The investigation introduces a novel approach for online build-order optimization in real-time strategy (RTS) games. The goal of our research is to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) RTS planning agent for military critical decision- making education with the ability to perform at an expert human level, as well as to assess a players critical decision- making ability or skill-level. Build-order optimization is modeled as a multi-objective problem (MOP), and solutions are generated utilizing a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) that provides a set of good build-orders to a RTS planning agent. We de ne three research objectives: (1) Design, implement and validate a capability to determine the skill-level of a RTS player. (2) Design, implement and validate a strategic planning tool that produces near expert level build-orders which are an ordered sequence of actions a player can issue to achieve a goal, and (3) Integrate the strategic planning tool into our existing RTS agent framework and an RTS game engine. The skill-level metric we selected provides an original and needed method of evaluating a RTS players skill-level during game play. This metric is a high-level description of how quickly a player executes a strategy versus known players executing the same strategy. Our strategic planning tool combines a game simulator and an MOEA to produce a set of diverse and good build-orders for an RTS agent. Through the integration of case-base reasoning (CBR), planning goals are derived and expert build- orders are injected into a MOEA population. The MOEA then produces a diverse and approximate Pareto front that is integrated into our AI RTS agent framework. Thus, the planning tool provides an innovative online approach for strategic planning in RTS games. Experimentation via the Spring Engine Balanced Annihilation game reveals that the strategic planner is able to discover build-orders that are better than an expert scripted agent and thus achieve faster strategy execution times

Robust Opponent Modeling in Real-Time Strategy Games using Bayesian Networks

Opponent modeling is a key challenge in Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games as the environment is adversarial in these games, and the player cannot predict the future actions of her opponent. Additionally, the environment is partially observable due to the fog of war. In this paper, we propose an opponent model which is robust to the observation noise existing due to the fog of war. In order to cope with the uncertainty existing in these games, we design a Bayesian network whose parameters are learned from an unlabeled game-logs dataset; so it does not require a human expert’s knowledge. We evaluate our model on StarCraft which is considered as a unified test-bed in this domain. The model is compared with that proposed by Synnaeve and Bessiere. Experimental results on recorded games of human players show that the proposed model can predict the opponent’s future decisions more effectively. Using this model, it is possible to create an adaptive game intelligence algorithm applicable to RTS games, where the concept of build order (the order of building construction) exists