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Towards Embodied StarCraft II Winner Prediction

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Computer Games (CGW 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1017))

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Abstract

Realtime strategy games (and especially StarCraft II) are currently becoming the ‘next big thing’ in Game AI, as building human competitive bots for complex games is still not possible. However, the abundance of existing game data makes StarCraft II an ideal testbed for machine learning. We attempt to use this for establishing winner predictors that in strong contrast to existing methods rely on partial information available to one player only. Such predictors can be made available to human players as a supportive AI component, but they can more importantly be used as state evaluations in order to inform strategic planning for a bot. We show that it is actually possible to reach accuracies near to the ones reported for full information with relatively simple techniques. Next to performance, we also look at the interpretability of the models that may be valuable for supporting human players as well as bot creators.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Duygu Cakmak: The grand strategy approach to AI at Emotech Meet AI 9 (London), March 22nd 2018.

  2. 2.

    https://starcraft2.com.

  3. 3.

    http://bwapi.github.io/.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/deepmind/pysc2/blob/master/docs/environment.md.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/deepmind/pysc2.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/Blizzard/s2protocol.

  7. 7.

    https://www.gamersensei.com/senseis/mperorm.

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Correspondence to Vanessa Volz .

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Volz, V., Preuss, M., Bonde, M.K. (2019). Towards Embodied StarCraft II Winner Prediction. In: Cazenave, T., Saffidine, A., Sturtevant, N. (eds) Computer Games. CGW 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24337-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24337-1_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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