Portfolio Online Evolution in StarCraft

Abstract

Portfolio Online Evolution is a novel method for playing real-time strategy games through evolutionary search in the space of assignments of scripts to individual game units. This method builds on and recombines two recently devised methods for playing multi-action games: (1) Portfolio Greedy Search, which searches in the space of heuristics assigned to units rather than in the space of actions, and (2) Online Evolution, which uses evolution rather than tree search to effectively play games where multiple actions per turn lead to enormous branching factors. The combination of both ideas lead to the use of evolution to search the space of which script/heuristic is assigned to which unit. In this paper, we introduce the ideas of Portfolio Online Evolution and apply it to StarCraft micro, or individual battles. It is shown to outperform all other tested methods in battles of moderate to large size.