StarCraft AI Competitions, Bots, and Tournament Manager Software

Abstract

Real-time strategy games have become an increasingly popular test bed for modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. With this rise in popularity has come the creation of several annual competitions, in which AI agents (bots) play the full game of StarCraft: Broodwar by Blizzard Entertainment. The three major annual StarCraft AI Competitions are the Student StarCraft AI Tournament, the Computational Intelligence in Games competition, and the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment competition. In this paper, we will give an overview of the current state of these competitions, describe the bots that compete in them, and describe the underlying open-source Tournament Manager software that runs them.