With the advent of the BWAPI StarCraft programming interface, interest in RTS game AI has increased considerably. At the 2011 AIIDE conference, several papers on the subject were presented --- ranging from build-order planning, over state estimation, to plan recognition. In addition, a panel discussion on RTS game AI took place, the StarCraft competition was discussed, prizes were awarded, and two exhibition match replays were shown. For some conference attendees, this was a bit too much StarCraft content. For others, it wasn't enough because little was said about the inner workings of the strongest competition entries.
To address these concerns, a workshop on RTS game AI topics was organized at AIIDE 2012.
This successful workshop attracted 10 paper submissions (of which 9 were accepted), and 20 attendees. It also sparked fruitful discussions which led to collaborations and new state-of-the-art combat AI modules.
The goal of this follow-up workshop is to again bring together AI researchers and game AI programmers from industry, who are interested in adversarial real-time game AI, to present and exchange ideas on the subject, and to discuss how academia and game companies can work together to improve the state-of-the-art in AI for real-time games.
The one-day workshop would consist of paper presentations on adversarial real-time game related AI topics (listed below), descriptions of StarCraft competition entries, a commented man-machine StarCraft match (most likely a replay), and a discussion on future research topics. The competition summary, results, and prizes will be presented in the main AIIDE conference.
Contributions will be peer-reviewed to meet AAAI workshop standards.
09:05 Welcome
09:10 Paper 1: Building Placement Optimization in Real-Time Strategy Games
[Nicolas Barriga, Marius Stanescu, *Michael Buro]
09:35 Paper 2: Sequential Pattern Mining in StarCraft:Brood War for Short and Long-Term Goals
[Michael Leece, *Arnav Jhala]
10:05 Paper 3: High-level Representations for Game-Tree Search in RTS Games
[*Alberto Uriarte, Santi Ontañón]
10:35 Break
11:00 Invited Talk: State Evaluation and Opponent Modelling in Real-Time Strategy Games
[Graham Erickson]
11:35 Invited Talk: GHOST: A Stealth Solver
[Florian Richoux]
12:40 Lunch
13:35 StarCraft Competition Report, Man-vs-Machine Matches, Software Update
[Dave Churchill]
14:45 Group Discussion: man vs. machine, research directions, workgroup topics
15:30 Break
15:45 Workgroup 1: Benchmark Problems
Workgroup 2: RTS Game AI Research Then, Recently, Next
16:50 Group reports
17:15 Dinner
The following people have agreed to help organizing the workshop (their exact functions have yet to be determined):
Other Likely Attendees (list compiled from research interest
and recent AIIDE attendance) are:
Alan Fern, Hector Munoz-Avila, Johan Hagelbäck, Risto
Miikkulainen, Chris Darken, Michael Mateas, Vadim Bulitko, Nathan
Sturtevant, Hendrik Baier, Andrew Budd, Martin Cerny, Christopher
Dragert, Alexander Jaffe, Owen Macindoe, Dana Nau, Eric Raboin, Glen
Robertson, Matthew Tretin, Alberto Uriarte Perez, Sung Jun Park,
Goncalo Pereira, Baylor Wetzel and other interested AIIDE 2014
attendees.