This project is developing and integrating statistical and symbolic methods of Artificial Intelligence in an agent architecture and evaluating the agent in a competitive domain, notably the real-time strategy game StarCraft. Real-time strategy (RTS) games provide several interesting research challenges including real-time decision making, enormous state spaces and imperfect information. StarCraft is a popular commercial RTS game that has several professional gaming leagues, and therefore ideal for evaluating the performance of AI agents. Professional StarCraft players reason about and react to strategic decisions at multiple levels of abstraction, sometimes executing over 300 game actions per minute, so developing competition-level StarCraft agents presents extraordinary challenges.
More specifically, the project is using novel supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms to automatically learn domain knowledge from collections of professional gameplay traces; the agent is being implemented within the reactive planning architecture ABL (A Behavior Language). The ABL reactive planner provides the glue for integrating multiple, heterogeneous reasoners within a real-time execution environment.
This work is expected to make significant contributions to the understanding of decision making processes in a complex, real-time domain. This understanding will contribute to the development of robust, intelligent systems that can be deployed within real-world environments. This work will motivate AI researchers to build integrated agent architectures. As a well-known game with very high-level professional play, research in StarCraft AI has the potential to attract significant attention to AI research. The StarCraft competition being hosted by our lab has attracted significant interest both within and outside academia, and at the high-school, undergraduate and graduate level. Thus, this work has the potential to raise general public awareness in research in human-level AI, and will encourage high-school students to pursue careers in computer science and game design.
