I'm not a java programmer and currently eclipse is telling me that it's going to take 60 minutes to download. How does the program itself work? Is there some SC2 API they are using for this or did they just write down all the values and are "simulating" a SC2 build.
It's a simulation - if you ignore your opponent and assume perfect execution, the result of build orders is deterministic within pretty close bounds. There are a number of tools around to do this, here is an online version showing the build order mentioned in the article:
SCFusion is nowhere near as good & maintained as WizardOfWin [1], which I've built. Although SCFusion is open-source, which may be a bonus point for some.
So how's your version better? Any new ideas to implement cross-over or make solutions more robust? Being open source is certainly an advance if you're mainly interested in the technical underpinnings...
Having built a quite advanced GA based build order calculator myself, I can say that it involved a lot of analyzing the game, followed by recreating parts of the game engine that touch construction/advancement/worker movement.
I figured this was how it worked. What ways did you use to get an accurate model of the rules? Did you just use wikis and a stopwatch to figure out how long builds take, what can be built when, etc. or did you actually memory watch or decompile the game itself to figure out the algorithms and loops used?
I made a Tic-Tac-Toe GA in undergrad as my senior project. It was horribly stupid, but I didn't reduce the problem space down, and I could have easily implemented rotation and flip mapping to reduce the search space by a significant amount (just over 7% of the nieve search space), but the algorithm still worked pretty well and served as a great learning experience.
The genetic part is ridiculously simple, IMO. The hard part is figuring out how to define the rules of the game, break them out, and figure out what maps to the genome and how it maps. Evolution from that point is simply modifying the genome in different ways.
No decompiling, just observing the game with a timer. I used a lot of community wiki/forum information as well. There has been some really amazing research done by the community [1][2], to figure out optimal resource harvesting strategies, and I used quite a bit of data from that.
Thanks for the info! It really helps knowing how others have solved problems like that. I am interested to know if there is an open source finite state machine for building in SC2.
