Human vs Bot matches: The end of rush humans?

The previous blog post I wrote about a number of matches between Iruian (the human player) and Krasi0 (the AI). LetaBot (Martin Rooijackers) commented asking whether Iruian could also beat his bot with a zergling rush. You may remember that Martin Rooijackers once wrote a blog post declaring the end of rush bots. He stated that holding off rushes is a solved problem for bots. Iruian took up the challenge and shared the replays on discord. There are 7 replays here, games one and seven Iruian 5-pools, games two and three he 5-pools and in the remaining three games he 9-pools.

LetaBot manages to hold off the 4 and 5 pools much better than Krasi0. He builds his bunker so that it protects the entire mineral line. He also builds his buildings close to the bunker. Occasionally buildings will be built outside of the range of the bunker. The marines are smart enough to not stay put inside the bunker though. They will move out to fend off those zerglings that try to attack, so that even the buildings farther away are protected. When the zerglings get to close to the marines, the marines retreat back into the bunker. LetaBot scores 4-0 against the 4 and 5 pools.

Against the 9 pool, however, he doesn’t fare so well. Iruian upgrades zergling speed and this allows his zerglings to pick off the marines as they try to retreat to the bunker. He methodically picks off a few marines and scvs before retreating. By repeating this again and again he manages to take out LetaBots defenses. LetaBot loses 0-3 to the 9-pool builds.

Admittedly, in his blog post, Martin Rooijackers specifically writes about holding off 4 and 5 pools and his bot does that very well. It is nice to see a bot play this well against it. Perhaps the next version of LetaBot will have an improvement to beat the 9 pool as well?