Grand Text Auto

One of Kevin Dill's game credits: Master of Orion 3

“The Art of Game AI: Sculpting Behavior with Data, Formulas, and Finesse”
Kevin Dill, Lockheed Martin

Date: Monday, March 15
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Place: E2-180 Simularium
Hosted By: Michael Mateas

Abstract
This lecture will explore the challenges that are involved in constructing believable AI behavior, the mindset that one must adopt to accurately model these behaviors, and the techniques that can be used to construct them. The attendee will leave with a broad summary of how to approach the artistry of constructing artificial behaviors – and will likely have adopted the annoying habit of assigning values and formulas to everything they see around them.

AIIDE 2010 has posted a call for papers, just in time to advertise the conference at GDC. The deadline for papers and the industry track is May 16, 2010.

This year AIIDE will also be hosting a StarCraft AI competition!

I attended Super Happy Dev House 36 and presented a lightening talk about the upcoming AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition. The competition is interesting to the hacker community at Super Happy Dev House, because the Broodwar API enabling the competition is a reverse engineering project providing direct access to game state and units in StarCraft. There are several projects built on top of the Broodwar API which enable developers to write StarCraft AI in a variety of languages including Java, Python, LUA and C#.

The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust, commercial RTS environment.  The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top performing bots.

Competition details are available here.

StarCraft

I’ve been interested in developing AI for StarCraft for several years now. I recently came across the Broodwar API project, which provides hooks into StarCraft. It enables developers to query game state as well as issue orders to units. The Broodwar API makes it possible to write custom AI bots for StarCraft.

There are several benefits to using StarCraft as an environment for evaluating game AI. StarCraft is a robust, commercial RTS game that has been around for over 10 years. The game is more complex than current research systems due to its distinct races, deep tech trees and large map pool. Also, StarCraft has developed a large following of players, resulting in a huge number of game traces available for analysis.