Student Starcraft AI Tournament Press Kit

Contents:

Factsheet

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

SSCAIT 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

Press/PR Contact

Banners

SSCAIT banner 1 SSCAIT banner 2

Posters

SSCAIT poster 1 SSCAIT poster 2

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