Grand Text Auto

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of delivering a keynote presentation at the 2011 Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2011) conference (part of the pleasure being the location, Waikiki beach in Hawaii). My slides are available in pdf (1.3M) and ppt (13.5M).

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.