Feel free to answer as many questions as you like, but it would be great if everyone answered everything! Please feel free to provide external references/links as necessary Bot Name: ICEBot Bot Race: Terran Author Name(s): Nguyen Duc Tung, Nguyen Quang Kien, Kawase Kiyohito, Yamamoto Takahiro, Lee Hyunchong, Awagakubo Ren, Ruck Thawonmas Affiliation(s): Ritsumeikan University Nationality(s): Vietnamese, Japanese, Thailand Occupation(s): Students, Professor (These will be listed on the competition website) Bot URL: Personal URL: Affiliation URL: Q: How did you become interested in Starcraft AI? One of our members participated a RTS competition session at CIG 2011. Q: How long have you been working on your bot? Three years. Q: About how many lines of code is your bot? More than 10.000 lines Q: Why did you choose the race of your bot? Long time before, one of our old members (Wang Zhe) is kind of a really good Terran player, most of the strategies in our bot come from him. Q: Did you use any existing code as the basis for your bot? If so, why, and what did you change? Yes, at first version of our bot we based on AIUR source code skeleton, after that we change a lot both in race and strategies, only the skeleton of AIUR remained. The reason is, well we rushed to attend CIG12 competition, so we grasp any source code that has a good modular design and using that design in our bot. Q: What is the overall strategy/strategies of your bot? Why did you choose them? In our bot we have several strategies, our bot can react against several enemy's openings. Because we're using Terran, so it's likely that we fortify our defense (favouring economy's opening) and attack enemy once some heuristic conditions have been met. Q: Do you incorporate learning of any form in your bot? If so, how was it accomplished? Currently no. Q: Do you use any interesting AI techniques or algorithms in your bot? If so, which? We're using Potential Flow (for scouting and micro-controlling) and some heuristic functions to decide attacking time and targets Q: What do you feel are the strongest and weakest parts of your bot's overall performance? Our bot is good against ground units, however we are not design it to strongly against air units so it only can react to a certain degree when enemy is using air-forces. Also, although out bot contains a lot of different strategies, it depends heavily on rule-bases, thus make it became really vulnerable once a flaw has been discovered. Q: If you competed in previous tournaments, what did you change for this year's entry? We changed a lot in implementation to get a better implementation (last year implementation is kind of faulty) than last year, fix alot of bugs and introducing some new strategies. Q: Have you tested your bot against humans? If so, how did it go? Yes, one of our members had tested it against human (he put it to Iccup), our bot rank is around D (http://iccup.com/en/starcraft/gamingprofile/ICEbot.html). Q: Any fun or interesting stories about the development / testing of your bot? Well, we put our bot to Iccup to play against human player for testing, a lot of bugs have been fixed through this process. Q: Any other projects you're working on that you'd like to advertise? Fighting Game AI Competition (http://www.ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp/~ftgaic/) 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? 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?