AIIDE StarCraft AI Competition - Survey

Feel free to answer as many questions as you like, but it would be great if everyone answered everything!
Many people are interested in learning as much as possible about the bots that competed!
Please feel free to provide external references/links as necessary

Bot Name: CUNYBot
Bot Race: Zerg	
Author Name(s): Bryan S. Weber	
Affiliation(s): College of Staten Island - City University of NYC.
Nationality(s): 
Occupation(s): Economist

(These will be listed on the competition website)
Bot URL: https://github.com/BryanSWeber/CUNYAIModule/
Personal URL: https://bryansweber.com/
Affiliation URL:  https://www.csi.cuny.edu/

Questions about your bot (please answer as many as you can, especially Q 1-3)

Q: What is the overall strategy/strategies of your bot? Why did you choose them?
	Macro - based strategy using formal economic modeling.   Bot plays particularly greedy and slowly adds units to the field. After lots of training it ends up playing a tit-for-tat style strategy and reacts to visible units.

Q: Did you incorporate any of the following AI techniques in your bot?
   If you did, please be as specific as possible
   
   a) Search-Based AI (Path-Finding, A*, MiniMax, MCTS, etc)
	Hand-tuned Boids-style movement. 
   b) Offline Machine Learning (Supervised or Unsupervised, but not RL)

   c) Offline Reinforcement Learning 

   d) Online Learning of any kind (Including competition file IO for strategy selection)
	Competition I/O file with GA for learning.  Played a few hundred games against random SSCAIT opponents on Docker on Random maps. Convergence is very slow against so many opponents, but does better in many repeated games against one opponent near its level.
   e) Influence Maps

   f) Custom Map Analysis
	
   g) Hard-coded or rule-based strategy / tactics

   h) Analysis of bots from previous competitions / hard-coded specific bot counter strategies
   
   i) Any techniques not mentioned here

Q: How did you become interested in Starcraft AI?

Q: How long have you been working on your bot?
	Less than 2 years.
Q: About how many lines of code is your bot?

Q: Why did you choose the race of your bot?
	Z has clear division between technology buildings and economic ones, while T and P produce from multiple sources.
Q: Did you use any existing code as the basis for your bot? If so, why, and what did you change?

Q: What do you feel are the strongest and weakest parts of your bot's overall performance?
	Unit choices and combat can be reworked/ redesigned. In the process of figuring out how to do this better.  Bot has trouble with imperfect information - when enemy makes a dramatic reveal of many troops and fails to respond appropriately.
Q: If you competed in previous tournaments, what did you change for this year's entry?

Q: Have you tested your bot against humans? If so, how did it go?

Q: Any fun or interesting stories about the development / testing of your bot?

Q: Any other projects you're working on that you'd like to advertise?



Optional Opinion Questions:

Q: What is your opinion on the current state of StarCraft AI? How long do you think before computers can beat humans in a best-of-7 match?
	4 years at best, 10 years at worst.
Q: What do you feel is the biggest hurdle (technological or otherwise) in improving your bot's AI?
	
Q: Which bots are the most interesting to you and why?
	

AIIDE Specific Question:

Q: Do you feel that the current format of iterated round-robin win percentage
   is a good indicator of bot skill ranking? If not, how would you change it?
	It seems as good as any. However, having an elimination phase would help change the focus from obtaining +0.001% against easier bots and into defeating each other.