[sbwm]

I worked on one of the agents for the first ORTS competition, waaay back in 2006. We were interested in Starcraft (which ORTS was a knockoff of) as a testbed for human-level AI, since ostensibly it has a pretty strong need for covering the entire "stack" from low-level reactions to planning and strategy. The strategic game is also open-ended enough that it seemed it would be especially interesting for testing humanlike AI compared to something like Chess or Go that can be reduced to a state search and heavily optimized.

What ended up happening was that actually winning the game came down to unit pathfinding and micromanagement (as well as plain old "not crashing"), and the planning and strategy part didn't really come out. So we moved on to other things.

I admittedly have not paid attention to this in years, but it looks like the modern game is still very much like that except much more mature, the strategic parts seem to be selecting heavily-optimized strategies from a playbook, making up something new doesn't help win the competition.

Does anyone know of any ongoing AI competitions that push more on the creative/strategic side?