Training an artificial intelligence is just the first step. The competition is getting more intense, and the biggest names in the market need to evaluate their projects' performance more deeply. The next goal is in video games, or more specifically, in conquering StarCraft. That brings us to Facebook, which participated in the AIIDE StarCraft AI Competition 2017 with its own bot called CherryPi. Its results weren't particularly terrible, but it's striking that it didn't make the Top 3.
All we need to do to better understand the scope of StarCraft is go to YouTube and search for a tournament, especially if it was organized in South Korea or features players from that country. StarCraft became the national sport there, and there were no transition problems after the sequel's release. In fact, Blizzard partly acknowledged its dedication through the character D.Va in Overwatch, a former professional South Korean player turned pilot of the MEKA division. Being so good at StarCraft, I wonder how they feel knowing that several artificial intelligences are looking to dominate the game, but before facing humans, what they're doing is fighting each other.
So we come to the AIIDE StarCraft AI Competition 2017, organized by David Churchill from Memorial University of Newfoundland. Basically, all the bots face each other using BWAPI, a library that enables direct connection with the StarCraft: Brood War engine. Those interested in deploying their skills can use the open source bot UAlbertaBot as a base, as long as they don't use an exact copy, but the new thing is that Facebook not only sponsored the tournament, but also entered its own bot, CherryPi. After generating thousands of games, the final results were published last Sunday morning, and with a 69.08 percent win rate, CherryPi finished in sixth place, out of a total of 28.
The winning bot is called ZZZKBot, created by Australian developer Chris Coxe. Its 83.11 percent win rate is remarkable, but Coxe didn't hesitate to declare his bot "a proof of concept" with a source code that "isn't that good". In other words, artificial intelligences still have a long way to go before presenting an acceptable challenge to human players. According to Churchill, bots from individual projects based on strict rules will continue to dominate the scene for a couple of years, but if companies like Facebook and Google are willing to throw all their firepower at StarCraft, the times will be much shorter.
