Introduction
Several AI competitions organized around RTS games have been organized in the past (such as the ORTS competitions, and the StarCraft AI competitions: AIIDE, CIG, SSCAI), which has spurred a new wave of research into RTS AI. However, as it has been reported numerous times, developing bots for RTS games such as StarCraft involves a very large amount of engineering, which often relegates the research aspects of the competition to a second plane. The microRTS competition has been created to motivate research in the basic research questions underlying the development of AI for RTS games while minimizing the amount of engineering required to participate. Also, a key difference with respect to the StarCraft competition is that the AIs have access to a "forward model" (i.e., a simulator), with which they can simulate the effect of actions or plans, thus allowing for planning and game-tree search techniques to be developed easily. Although we acknowledge that planning in domains for which the agent does not have a forward model is a very important problem, this is left out of this competition, in order to focus on other core RTS problems.
The competition is organized around "tracks", each of them aimed at one key research challenge in RTS Game AI (submissions can participate in one or more tracks), while in previous competitions there were 3 or 2 tracks, the 2024 competition will feature only one track (due to the lack of popularity of the 2nd and 3rd).
The winner of the competition will be determined with a round robin tournament where each agent plays all the other agents (and a few agents the organizers will add to the pool) in a set of maps. A victory counts as 1.0, a draw as 0.5, and a defeat as 0.0. The agent with the highest score in the round robin tournament will be determined as the winner of the competition.
Single Track: While in previous competitions there were 3 or 2 tracks, the 2024 competition will feature only 1 track (due to the lack of popularity of the other tracks):
Classic track, which focuses on the problem of large state spaces and branching factors by making the game fully observable. The game will be configured to be deterministic.
Results from the 2023, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017 competitions are available here!
There will be a CoG 2024 competition, colocated with the CoG 2024 conference. Submission deadline July 8th, 2024