StarCraft is one of the most popular games ever, a huge hit from a company known for hits. It demands great skill of its players, and it is a mainstay of professional gaming leagues. In Korea, the game is so popular that professional StarCraft players are celebrities with six-figure contracts and their games broadcast live on national TV.
It also happens to be a deeply challenging arena for artificial intelligence, and a successful StarCraft AI agent must attempt to solve a number of hard problems. Dan, who also teaches the introduction to AI class at Berkeley, says, “I can literally walk down the list of concepts we cover and show you where every one of them show up in StarCraft and in our agent.”
StarCraft was released in 1998, an eternity ago by video game standards. Over those years Blizzard Entertainment, the game’s creator, has continually updated it so that it’s one of the most finely tuned and balanced Real Time Strategy (RTS) games ever made. It has three playable races: the human-like Terrans, with familiar tanks and starships, the alien Zerg, with large swarms of organic creatures, and the Protoss, technologically advanced aliens reliant on powerful but expensive units. Each race has different units and gameplay philosophies, yet no one race or combination of units has an unbeatable advantage. Player skill, ingenuity, and the ability to react intelligently to enemy actions determine victory….
Read more at the source (Arstechnica)
