Tourney players replaced with robots

Due to lack of availability of all the organizers, the month's tourney will be postponed until first week of December.

While it would be possible to hold the human tournament this weekend, convening an adequate amount of human players with an announcement on Wednesday seems impossible.

With that in mind, this Saturday will still hold a tournament, with players who are much easier to assemble: AI's!

The machines will duke it out round-robin BO3, ranked by win count. All ties will be resolved by additional games.

The tourney will likely be hosted on SpringGrid operated by gajop in a massively parallelized fashion, and the replays will be published after the games are resolved in this case. If the grid is somehow not available, the games will be manually proceeded at 4x speed on Springie hosts.

Maps for each game will be determined randomly by the tournament host device from this list:

TitanDuel
Eye_Of_Horus_v2
Intersection_v3
Red Comet
Barren
Bandit_Plains_v1
wanderlust_V01
Victoria Crater v2.1

The initial participant list is as follows:
CAI
CircuitAI
FreundAI
Shard (as shipped with engine version 100.0)
ZKGBAI

All these will be assembled in their latest available binary form (compiled linux64) and frozen at Friday, 27th November 2015, 23:59 UTC.

Additional bots can be submitted before that time as well in compiled binary form or source, compilation of which will be attempted but not guaranteed.

The only requirement is that the bots don't use cheats.

And thus, glory to the robots.

What is SpringGrid?

Dang, I'm gonna have to turn out to watch this one XD

Also, how would I go about building an AI?

quote: The only requirement is that the bots don't use cheats.

I think CAI does maphack a bit though?
In UnitDamaged() it calls spotEnemyUnit() on the attacking enemy unit and uses its coordinates. As far I can tell there is no checking if the AI actually has line of sight on the attacker.
Also there is this comment:
-- check if a spot is covered by enemies within attack range
-- FIXME: this actually involves maphax - 'course it wouldn't need to if it remembered where bad guy turrets are...

It does not seem to use the enemy coordinates directly, more indirectly for updating its heatmaps on enemy. Like "vaguely knowing" or "guessing", similiar to how human might guess a turret/silo position from watching the projectiles fly. So maybe it is merely a simplification but I wanted to post a gif.

You should swap bandit plains for Trojan hills, spider play on Trojan is cool to watch.

In other news, quick! Program your AIs to abuse inability of all other AIs to use AA!

Ooooo an AI tournament!

Shard has a map-hack, but otherwise it doesn't cheat, not unless something shady using cross-AI<-> Gadget comms was added.

Shards Lua component also lacks a cheating interface, and the whole thing is open source of-course, so while I can spawn 10,000 units via C++, I doubt that I can travel back in time to the v100 spring release and sneak the code in. Or maybe I'm a fortune teller? ;D

j/k I actually didn't write the Zero-K specific Shard logic

[GBC]1v0ry_k1ng Circuit already does, but kgb will AA by the tournament. :P

quote: How do other AIs block Shard from cheating?

Probably by not enabling cheats. I think the way cheating works with the ai interface is similar to a human typing /cheat, so if an AI opts out, the others may not be allowed to use them either. That's just my guess anyway.

quote: How do other AIs block Shard from cheating?

Ehm, AIs actually don't block. I guess Anarchid meant that others outplay Shard in current stage. Cheats enabled per skirmishAIId, so others can't influence it.

quote: Ehm, AIs actually don't block. I guess Anarchid meant that others outplay Shard in current stage

Theoretically, that's how it should be but each time Shard attempts to play against ZKGBAI on my local host, it acts as if it doesn't have maphack: spams errors for "no target visible" and all its glaives sit on the same place *right until* the first enemy deigns to walk into their range. Then they joyously all mob it.

Causes all kinds of hilarity in AI 2v2's where the other bot can scout - that sudden glaive wave causes exquisite disruptions to the measured pace of a typical AI match.

Is terraforming considered as cheating?