Automaton2000Micro
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2016–2018
1:23 · 757K views · Apr 3, 2011
A short demo of Automaton 2000 Micro, a StarCraft bot built in Blizzard's World Editor that splits marines perfectly against banelings. It shows inhuman unit micromanagement with zero losses.
Cited in StarCraft AI threads to show how much perfect micro matters, though one commenter finds such play boring.
4 comments from Hacker News
It's possible but it's a lot more context-driven than you think with a human involved. The bots do great against each other with their strategies and muscle-memory stuff. Throw a human in the mix, they start noticing patterns in how the units are managed, what strategies are likely, etc. They've exploited these in the competitions to hilarious effect. Here's the main site on prior work & results at the competitions: [LINK] Here's a few examples of how the muscle-memory approach, esp if focused on unit vs unit, can fail against humans. " In this example, Bakuryu (human) notices that Skynet's units will chase his zerglings if they are near, and proceeds to run around Skynet's base to distract Skynet long enough so that Bakuryu can make fying units to come attack Skynet's base. This type of behaviour is incredibly hard to detect in a bot, since it requires knowledge of the larger context of the game which may only have consequences 5 or more minutes in the future. " (2013) Note: At this point, they also sucked at building and expansion strategies which surprised me since I thought a basic planner would be able to do that. The constraints between rate of expansion, where to place stuff, what units to keep/build, and so on get really hard. The other thing they weren't good at was switching strategies mid-game based on what opponents are doing. " despite Djem5 (pro) making the bots look silly this year... they were able to defeat D-ranked, and even some C-ranked players. After the
Well, anyone who says that advantage in micromanagement is not a big thing should see "Automaton 2000" videos. Given that automaton is a map script and thus can have virtually unlimited APM, it beats people from a horribly disadvantageous positions (40 banelings vs 21 marine [1], or 100 zerglings vs 20 sieged tanks [2]). [1]: this video [2]: [LINK]
A 'perfectly' micro-ing AI is both boring to implement and boring to play against. Somebody made one for SC2 back when that was popular, take a look at these videos to see how uninteresting it would become after the first attempt. [LINK] [LINK] this video
Wow, I hadn't seen this before. Here is "Automaton 2000" controlling 20 marines vs 40 banelings, without losing a single unit. this video Pretty cool.