The Berkeley Overmind Project

Description

The Overmind is an agent for playing StarCraft®: Brood War®, using BWAPI. Our agent combines both old and new AI techniques. At a high level, we use a shallow planner to enforce resource constraints and to ensure reasonable tech progression. Our microcontrollers use a combination of novel, threat-aware modifications to A* pathing and potential fields whose parameters were tuned using reinforcement learning.

See videos of the Overmind in action, below!

News

• More videos are now posted!
• The Overmind has won the AIIDE 2010 StarCraft Competition!

Videos

We now have high quality casts on Youtube by commentator Modulistack! Take a look here.

Videos will pop under when you click on them.

• A highlight from the final match, courtesy of Ben Weber. We're the Mutalisks (the flying dragon creatures).
  
  
  
• An overview of the UCB Overmind System, including a description of our high level strategy as well as some details about the techniques our system uses.
  
  
• Mutalisk hit and run, the Overmind's standard tactic for containing and wearing down its opponent.
  
  
• Learning to fight high templars, an illustration of Valhalla, the staging ground where the Overmind battles endlessly to automatically learn optimal combat parameters.
  
  
• A video showing Sparky the Wonder Drone, in their base, stealing their gas.
  
  
• Mutalisks against cloaked wraiths, a demonstration of how the Overmind sends overlords to join the battle when cloaked units are around.
  
  
• Mutalisks against Archons, describing the Overmind's targetting priorities and illustrating how it avoids taking damage until it believes it's strong enough to win a head-on fight.
  
  
• More videos coming soon!

Press

• A full-length article on the Overmind is now available on Ars Technica!
• The Overmind has been mentioned in the October 30 issue of the New Scientist. (Subscription required.)
• The Overmind has gone international!
• The Overmind has been mentioned on Tom's Hardware.
• The Overmind has been mentioned on Fidgit.
• The Overmind has been mentioned on Kotaku.
• The Overmind's win and the results of the competition are described in The Escapist.
• The Overmind's win and the results of the competition have been Slashdotted!

Team

Principal Investigator

• Dan Klein

Team Leads

• David Burkett: Mutalisks. Potential Fields. Target Selection.
• David Hall: Macro Mechanics. Base Defense. Infrastructure.

Team Members

• Taylor Berk-Kirkpatrick: Pathing. Overlord Sensing.
• John Blitzer: Consultant.
• John DeNero: Initial Explorations.
• Haomiao Huang: Probabilistic Sensing and Threat Estimation.
• Eugene Ma: Infrastructure. Tech Tree. Scouting.
• Yewen "Evan" Pu: Sunken Colonies. Zerglings. Levity.
• Jie Tang: Zerglings. Sparky the Wonder Drone.
• Nicholas Hay: Resource management.
• Oriol Vinyals: Coach. Retired Pro.
• Jason Wolfe: Scheduling.

Contact

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Credits

Infested Bear logo by Andrea Goh.
StarCraft® and Starcraft: BroodWar® are registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.