Strategy is what matters here. That's what I was getting at with the last part of my first message. We can make bots that do certain aspects of the game flawlessly and we will need to find a way to integrate them.
Well, you know, it would probably be an enormous investment to get a general-purpose bot that could win the tournament, but you could write a simple bot with simple strategies pretty quickly (assuming that the API is sane.) For example, you could write a bot that always executes the same kind of rush right away, or one that just tries to expand absolutely everywhere on the map as fast as it can until it has X supply of workers. That's both fun and a great addition to the competition since it diversifies the ecosystem that the serious bots have to deal with.
I believe we share the same goal: make it easy to build smart bots. This is a very hard problem, all of us are far from solving it. It's good that different approaches are tried.
Building a cooperative bot for 5v5 will impress me a lot more. People are rather good at this sort of thing and so far AI is more likely be become good at 1v1 games (Go, Chess, etc). If there is anything I've learned after 3 decades in this industry is that people are devious.
I don't ask for help, I just want to know if people are really trying to create a bot. Currently 90% of games are between only two AI. ("wolfie vs wolfie vs arthropod vs arthropod"). A competition like this one is much more interesting if there is a lot of players.
You can write a bot player that follows a script or applies some simple decision rules. The hard part is detecting whether or not the game is operating correctly at each step. It's not like a simple web application where things happen in discrete steps and you can inspect the DOM to verify that it contains the right nodes.
When you share strategies, you still have to manually execute them. Not just copy and paste them into a bot and have it play the game by itself with no interaction.
What fun is a game about coding if you don't actually have to do any coding?
Once people start developing bots for a game it has pretty much reached this point. While usually not kosher, in some games I think developing a bot for them would be more interesting than the game itself
I you read the article you will see a lot of discussion on different strategies the bot has (re)discovered. You can also try playing against others on the internet and see how well your method works.
Isn't there a lot of competition in this space? It seems like your bots would need to be particularly intelligent or the interface would need to be particularly low friction.
Isn't it incredibly difficult to build a bot that plays gametheoretically optimal, other than in rather simple situations (like large portions of a heads up limit match)? My friends who understand such things tell me not to worry about it just yet.
Fascinating, thanks for the answers. The bot improvements in the last few months have been so radical I can't begin to imagine how much it must be disrupting the strategic landscape and player status.
That's what I was thinking too; instead of a one-on-one, what if you could have 10-100 bots that operated with different strategies and worked together? I think it would so cool to have multiple teams of players all competing at once.
Sort of a programmable MMO/RTS, where the fun would be the strategy development and extra-game political aspects.
Where I'm getting hung up is on the exact game mechanics; I want to make it so the simulation runs for a long time, but I don't want a single player or team able to develop an insurmountable advantage. I'm thinking to start you get a robot in a sandbox world where it would gather resources and you could test strategies, and when you're ready you can transport the bot to the real world to compete.
I was writing this in C++ so the memory overhead per robot was just barely over 64k. A server with 8gigs of RAM could run a simulation in memory with about 100,000 bots, periodically saving the game state to disk in case of a failure.
Not only that, but also lets not forget humans learn as well. Meaning the more games players play against the bot the better they would become at understanding and defeating it.
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