The StarCraft AI competition was created to harness and promote StarCraft as a research environment. AI researchers have used RTS games in the past, but their efforts were hampered by the technology available. Open-source games were buggy and untested, and commercial games like StarCraft were inaccessible.
This changed in early 2009 with the release of the Brood War API (BWAPI), an open-source toolkit developed by a group of enthusiasts that gives direct access to the game. Ben Weber, a student in the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz, had been working on RTS game-based research. He realized that StarCraft and BWAPI could make an immediate impact on his work and be a valuable tool for the AI community. He set about organizing a tournament for StarCraft AI agents to compete against each other, hoping to kick-start progress and raise interest.
The announcement for the tournament was made in November of 2009, and the word soon went out on gaming websites and blogs: the 2010 Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) Conference, to be held in October 2010 at Stanford University, would host the first ever StarCraft AI competition.
Read the full article at Arstechnica
