Student Starcraft AI Tournament Press Kit
Factsheet
- Hosts: Czech Technical University in Prague & Comenius University, Bratislava
- Founder & Organizer: Michal Čertický
- Founded: 2011
- Website: sscaitournament.com
- Social: discordapp.com/invite/w9wRRrF / facebook.com/groups/bwapi / twitter.com/sscaitournament
- Liquipedia: SSCAIT on Liquipedia.net
- Partner organisations:
What is SSCAIT?
The Student StarCraft AI Tournament is an educational event, first held in 2011. It serves as a challenging competitive environment for students of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, as well as other AI and Broodwar enthousiasts. They are submitting the bots, which are programmed in C++ or Java using the custom API BWAPI to play 1v1 StarCraft matches against one another.
Since the tournament already has quite a history, we usually invite back a number of participants that have been in the scene from the very start, and of course numerous newly developed entrants hope to achieve big things, or add a little glamour to their BA/MA theses or CVs.
This being a strictly AI vs AI tournament, humans will only be coding and handling the servers. In 2015, Russian player Djem5 played a couple of demonstration matches, in which he summarily beat all AI opposition without breaking a sweat. In the current state of Broodwar AI, bots tend to lose because they're not as adaptive as humans yet, so they can be tricked by abusing situations they are not yet able to handle.
What this year's tournament is all about
Every year we see an increase in the amount of actual AI involved in the matches. While most of the older bots have hard-coded plans of what to build when, where to attack and how, newer bots apply a mixture of those methods and adaptive programming. They are able to respond to the adversary's air-units by building anti-air weapons or to delay the production of combat units in favour of economic expansion, based on scouting information. Thus, they will have a stronger economy, and a better chance of victory in the long run. A handful of bots actively engage in learning strategies, like Martin Rooijackers' LetaBot, Dave Churchill's UAlbertaBot, tscmoo and others who employ the machine learning algorithms that allow the AI to learn from watching replays of earlier played games, or simply by playing the game a lot. The most successful AI is usually the one with the optimal balance between a good plan, clever heuristics and fastest learning capabilities.
Videos
Introduction to Broodwar AI and SSCAIT. |
2014 finals between XIMP and LetaBot. |
tscmoo nuking everything. |
krasi0 vs tscmoo zerg. |
More recent videos. |
Images
These images are from our tournament live stream server. Some contain debug-information from the bots in question.
High fps debug information. |
Zergling rush. |
Terran vs Protoss with graphical path-finding. |
Terran Wraiths destroying the enemy. |
Logo
Team
The list of people who kept the tournament running as of 2015. Since then, the whole project has been open-sourced and the list of contributors is more fluid.
Michal Čertický | Founder, Admin, Programming | homepage | |
Paul Paradies | PR, Promo, Community Management | homepage | |
Marek Šuppa | Security, Programming (web) | homepage | |
Björn Persson Mattsson | Programming (tournament module & observer) | homepage | |
Tomáš Vajda | Programming (torurnament module & observer) | ||
Rafał Poniatowski | Bug reporting, Programming (web) | ||
Sören Klett | Bug reporting |
In the news
- Inverse.com article - Article about SSCAIT 2017/18 and an interview with the founder.
- Rock, Paper, Shotgun article - Interview with LetaBot, written in January 2016.
- Kotaku article - News article about SSCAI 2014.
- Rock, Paper, Shotgun article - News article about SSCAI 2014.
- Robime.IT article about SSCAI 2012 - An interview with the winner of student division of SSCAI 2012.
- Ars Technica Article about BWAPI and SC AI Competition - This is an interesting reading for anyone, especially the students who haven't played StarCraft yet.
- ITnews.sk article about this tournament - Coverage of 2011 year of SSCAI tournament on ITnews.sk portal (slovak language).