We present a novel perception model named Herd's Eye View (HEV) that adopts a global perspective derived from multiple agents to boost the decision-making capabilities of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in multi-agent environments, specifically in the context of game AI. The HEV approach utilizes cooperative perception to empower RL agents with a global reasoning ability, enhancing their decision-making. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the HEV within simulated game environments and highlight its superior performance compared to traditional ego-centric perception models. This work contributes to cooperative perception and multi-agent reinforcement learning by offering a more realistic and efficient perspective for global coordination and decision-making within game environments. Moreover, our approach promotes broader AI applications beyond gaming by addressing constraints faced by AI in other fields such as robotics. The code is available at https://github.com/andrewnash/Herds-Eye-View

Real-Time Strategy games have become a popular test-bed for modern AI system due to their real-time computational constraints, complex multi-unit control problems, and imperfect information. One of the most important aspects of any RTS AI system is the efficient control of units in complex combat scenarios, also known as micromanagement. Recently, a model-based heuristic search technique called Portfolio Greedy Search (PGS) has shown promisingpaper we present the first integration of PGS into the StarCraft game engine, and compare its performance to the current state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning method in several benchmark combat scenarios. We then perform theperformance for providing real-time decision making in RTS combat scenarios, but has so far only been tested in SparCraft: an RTS combat simulator. In this same experiments within the SparCraft simulator in order to investigate any differences between PGS performance in the simulator and in the actual game. Lastly, we investigate how varying parameters of the SparCraft simulator affect the performance of PGS in the StarCraft game engine. We demonstrate that the performance of PGS relies heavily on the accuracy of the underlying model, outperforming other techniques only for scenarios where the SparCraft simulation model more accurately matches the StarCraft game engine.

Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games have become an increasingly popular test-bed for modern artificial intelligence techniques. With this rise in popularity has come the creation of several annual competitions, in which AI agents (bots) play the full game of StarCraft: Broodwar by Blizzard Entertainment. The three major annual StarCraft AI Competitions are the Student StarCraft AI Tournament (SSCAIT), the Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG) competition, and the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) competition. In this paper we will give an overview of the current state of these competitions, and the bots that compete in them.

This paper describes entries to the third Playable Experiences track to be held at the AIIDE conference. We discuss the five entries accepted to the track for 2015, as well as the ongoing development of the track as part of AIIDE.

Online strategy video games offer several unique challenges to the field of AI research. Due to their large state and action spaces, existing search algorithms have difficulties in making strategically strong decisions. Additionally, the nature of competitive on-line video games adds the requirement that game designers be able to tweak game properties regularly when strategic imbalances are found. This means that an AI system for a game like this needs to be robust to such changes and less reliant on expert knowledge. This paper makes two main contributions to advancing the state of the art for AI in modern strategy video games which have large state and action spaces. The first is a novel method for performing hierarchical search using a portfolio of algorithms to reduce the search space while maintaining strong action candidates. The second contribution is an overall AI architecture for strategy video games using this portfolio search method. The proposed methods are used as the AI system for Prismata, an online turn-based strategy game by Lunarch Studios. This system is evaluated using three experiments: on-line play vs.~human players, off-line AI tournaments to test the relative strengths of the AI bots, and a survey to determine user satisfaction of the system so far. Our result show that this system achieves a skill level in the top 25% of human players on the ranked ladder, can be modified quickly to create different difficulty settings, is robust to changes in game unit properties, and creates an overall AI experience which is user rated more enjoyable than those currently found in similar video games.

In 2014, AIIDE will host the Fifth Annual StarCraft AI Competition. Participants are given the task of building the best performing AI system for the popular real-time strategy game StarCraft Brood War (Blizzard Entertainment). The goals of the competition are to provide a testbed for real-time AI systems and to promote game AI research by ex- hibiting AI techniques such as scripting, planning, optimization, spatial reasoning, and opponent modeling in a fast-paced popular video game.

In 2013, AIIDE will host the Fourth Annual Star-Craft AI Competition. Participants are given the task of building the best performing AI system for the popular real-time strategy game StarCraft Brood War (Blizzard Entertainment). Thee goals of the competition are to provide a testbed for real-time AI systems and to promote game AI research by exhibiting AI techniques such as scripting, planning, optimization, spatial reasoning, and opponent modeling in a fast-paced popular video game.

The Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) was held October 8-12, 2012, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The conference included a research and industry track as well as a demonstration program. The conference featured 16 technical papers, 16 posters, and one demonstration, along with invited speakers, the StarCraft Ai competition, a newly-introduced Doctoral Consortium, and 5 workshops.

The Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) was held October 8-12, 2012, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The conference included a research and industry track as well as a demonstration program. The conference featured 16 technical papers, 16 posters, and one demonstration, along with invited speakers, the StarCraft Ai competition, a newly-introduced Doctoral Consortium, and 5 workshops. This report summarizes the activities of the conference.

In recent years, real-time strategy (RTS) games have gained attention in the AI research community for their multitude of challenging and relevant real-time decision problems that have to be solved in order to win against human experts or to effectively collaborate with other players in team-games. In this article we motivate research in this area, give an overview of past RTS game AI competitions, and discuss future directions.