204 research outputs found
StarCraft Bots and Competitions
International audienceDefinition Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games is a sub-genre of strategy games where players need to build an economy (gathering resources and building a base) and military power (training units and researching technologies) in order to defeat their opponents (destroying their army and base). Artificial Intelligence (AI) problems related to RTS games deal with the behavior of an artificial player. Since 2010, many international competitions have been organized to match AIs, or bots, playing to the RTS game StarCraft. This chapter presents a review of all major international competitions from 2010 until 2015, and details some competing StarCraft bots. State of the Art Bots for StarCraft Thanks to the recent organization of international game AI competitions fo-cused around the popular StarCraft game, several groups have been working on integrating many of the techniques developed for RTS game AI into complete "bots", capable of playing complete StarCraft games. In this chapter we will overview some of the currently available top bots, and their results of recent competitions
Macro action selection with deep reinforcement learning in StarCraft
StarCraft (SC) is one of the most popular and successful Real Time Strategy
(RTS) games. In recent years, SC is also widely accepted as a challenging
testbed for AI research because of its enormous state space, partially observed
information, multi-agent collaboration, and so on. With the help of annual
AIIDE and CIG competitions, a growing number of SC bots are proposed and
continuously improved. However, a large gap remains between the top-level bot
and the professional human player. One vital reason is that current SC bots
mainly rely on predefined rules to select macro actions during their games.
These rules are not scalable and efficient enough to cope with the enormous yet
partially observed state space in the game. In this paper, we propose a deep
reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to improve the selection of macro
actions. Our framework is based on the combination of the Ape-X DQN and the
Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM). We use this framework to build our bot, named as
LastOrder. Our evaluation, based on training against all bots from the AIIDE
2017 StarCraft AI competition set, shows that LastOrder achieves an 83% winning
rate, outperforming 26 bots in total 28 entrants
microPhantom: Playing microRTS under uncertainty and chaos
This competition paper presents microPhantom, a bot playing microRTS and
participating in the 2020 microRTS AI competition. microPhantom is based on our
previous bot POAdaptive which won the partially observable track of the 2018
and 2019 microRTS AI competitions. In this paper, we focus on decision-making
under uncertainty, by tackling the Unit Production Problem with a method based
on a combination of Constraint Programming and decision theory. We show that
using our method to decide which units to train improves significantly the win
rate against the second-best microRTS bot from the partially observable track.
We also show that our method is resilient in chaotic environments, with a very
small loss of efficiency only. To allow replicability and to facilitate further
research, the source code of microPhantom is available, as well as the
Constraint Programming toolkit it uses
Macro action selection with deep reinforcement learning in StarCraft
StarCraft (SC) is one of the most popular and successful Real Time Strategy
(RTS) games. In recent years, SC is also considered as a testbed for AI
research, due to its enormous state space, hidden information, multi-agent
collaboration and so on. Thanks to the annual AIIDE and CIG competitions, a
growing number of bots are proposed and being continuously improved. However, a
big gap still remains between the top bot and the professional human players.
One vital reason is that current bots mainly rely on predefined rules to
perform macro actions. These rules are not scalable and efficient enough to
cope with the large but partially observed macro state space in SC. In this
paper, we propose a DRL based framework to do macro action selection. Our
framework combines the reinforcement learning approach Ape-X DQN with
Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) to improve the macro action selection in bot. We
evaluate our bot, named as LastOrder, on the AIIDE 2017 StarCraft AI
competition bots set. Our bot achieves overall 83% win-rate, outperforming 26
bots in total 28 entrants
ViZDoom Competitions: Playing Doom from Pixels
This paper presents the first two editions of Visual Doom AI Competition,
held in 2016 and 2017. The challenge was to create bots that compete in a
multi-player deathmatch in a first-person shooter (FPS) game, Doom. The bots
had to make their decisions based solely on visual information, i.e., a raw
screen buffer. To play well, the bots needed to understand their surroundings,
navigate, explore, and handle the opponents at the same time. These aspects,
together with the competitive multi-agent aspect of the game, make the
competition a unique platform for evaluating the state of the art reinforcement
learning algorithms. The paper discusses the rules, solutions, results, and
statistics that give insight into the agents' behaviors. Best-performing agents
are described in more detail. The results of the competition lead to the
conclusion that, although reinforcement learning can produce capable Doom bots,
they still are not yet able to successfully compete against humans in this
game. The paper also revisits the ViZDoom environment, which is a flexible,
easy to use, and efficient 3D platform for research for vision-based
reinforcement learning, based on a well-recognized first-person perspective
game Doom
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