Introduction

News

  • [June 12 2020] Rule page update.
  • [June 8 2020] Cheong-Mok Bae (GIST) will join as an organizer of this year competition.
  • [June 8 2020] We’ll soon update rules, maps and other missing information.
  • [June 8 2020] Prize Information
    – IEEE CIS decided to only sponsor a first prize (500$) for the best entry of this competition
    – Anyone who win the competition is eligible to the prize money (it’s not limited to students or young professionals)
  • [March 31 2020] IEEE CIS will provide with competition funding for First Prize (500$)
  • [Jan 31 2020] Registration/Submission Deadlines announced
    Registration: June 19th (Friday) 2020 => July 3rd (Friday) 2020 (added March 31)
    Submission: July 17th (Friday) 2020 => July 31st (Friday) 2020 (added March 31)
    All Times are Anywhere on Earth (added March 31)
  • [Jan 29 2020] 2020 Competition page was created

Introduction

Welcome to the home of the annual IEEE CoG StarCraft AI competition which is organized by the Cognition & Intelligence Lab (CILab) at GIST, Seoul, Korea. It is sponsored by the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG).

During this competition, programs (“bots”) will play 1v1 Starcraft Broodwar games against each other using BWAPI, a software library that makes it possible to connect programs to the Starcraft: BroodWar game engine.

The purpose of this competition is to foster the development & evaluation of progress in AI development applied to real-time strategy (RTS) games and solve challenging issues in RTS game AI such as uncertainty, real-time processing, and managing & coordinating agents. Where feasible, the competition strives for openness, transparency, reusability and reproducibility, both in the way the competition rules are defined and evaluated, and in the bots themselves.

RTS games pose a much greater challenge for AI research than chess because of hidden information, vast state and action spaces, and the requirement to act quickly. The best human players still have the upper hand in RTS games, but in the years to come this will likely change, thanks to competitions like this one. IEEE CoG StarCraft competitions have shown significant progress in the development and evolution of new StarCraft bots. For the evolution of the bots, participants have used various approaches to write AI bots and it has enriched game AI and methods such as HMM, Bayesian model, CBR, Potential fields, and reinforcement learning. However, it is still quite challenging to develop AI for the game because it should handle many units and buildings while considering resource management and high-level tactics.

 

Getting Started

Additional Software