Battle Master

Battle Master (btlmaster) is an AI agent created to play Pokemon battles (particularly by connecting to an instance of Pokemon Shodown). It uses the CLARION cognitive architecture as opposed to any particular AI paradigm.

In creator Ron Sun's words from the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Science, CLARION is

... a hybrid cognitive architecture... that is signicantly dierent from most existing cognitive architectures in several important respects. For one thing, the CLARION cognitive architecture is hybrid in that it (a) combines connectionist and symbolic representations computationally, (b) combines implicit and explicit psychological processes, and (c) combines cognition (in the narrow sense) and other psychological processes (such as motivation and emotion).

Usage

Battle master is intended to be an executable application. It is capable of connecting to a Pokemon Showdown server to play against opponents. Configuration (such as user credentials) and a running Pokemon Showdown server are all that is needed to run Battle Master.

Clone the project and install dependencies

Clone the project and create a virtual environment.

git clone git@github.com:SirSkaro/battle-master.git
cd battle-master
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate   #.venv\Scripts\activate.bat for Windows
pip install -r requirements.txt

The rest of the documentation assumes your working directory is the root of the project.

Configure

Rename config.ini.template to config.ini.

Agent user configuration

Battle Master will log into a Pokemon Shdown server as a registered user. As such, you will need to have an account registered. Specify this account's credentials in the showdown:username and showdown:password fields.

Additionally, specify the name of the user you want the agent to challenge upon startup in the opponent:username field.

Showdown configuration

Provide the location of the Pokemon Showdown server and the authentication server in the showdown:server_url and showdown:auth_url fields, respectively. It is recommended to use Smogon's authentication server to easily go back and forth between Pokemon Showdown servers.

Your config file should look something like this:

[showdown]
username=Foo
password=Bar
server_url=sim.smogon.com:8000   # or localhost:8000 if running locally
auth_url=https://play.pokemonshowdown.com/action.php?

[agent]
max_concurrent_battles=10

Running the Agent

Battle Master can be ran in two different modes: challenge and benchmark. For additional information, use the -h (help) flag.

python -m battlemaster -h

Challenge

For challenge mode, you must specify the username of the opponent you want Battle Master to challenge upon start up. The program will block until the battle terminates.

python -m battlemaster challenge -h #for additional information
python -m battlemaster challenge "Sir Skaro"

Ladder

For ladder mode, you must specify the number of battles you want the agent to play on the ranked ladder. The program will block until the agent has finished all battles.

python -m battlemaster ladder -h #for additional information
python -m battlemaster ladder 5

Benchmark

benchmark mode initiates the specified number of battles against a named baseline agent for evaluation purposes. This baseline agent always picks random actions.

python -m battlemaster benchmark -h #for additional information
python -m battlemaster benchmark random 100

Development/Local Setup

If you want a completely local setup (such as for development purposes), you can run a Pokemon Showdown server locally. You can also disable security to remove rate limiting and throttling, which can be useful for benchmarking.

Running Tests

This project uses pytest as a test library. To run the tests, simply execute the pytest command in the base of the project.

pytest

Docker

Included in the top-level local-setup directory is a Dockerfile to create an image of a Pokemon Showdown with security disabled (including automated chat moderation daemons). It runs on the default port 8000.

docker build -t pokemon-showdown -f local-setup/PokemonShowdownDockerfile .
docker run -p 8000:8000 -d pokemon-showdown:latest

Alternatively you can pull the source code for Pokemon Showdown and manually run it. This will require an installation of Node.js.

git clone https://github.com/smogon/pokemon-showdown.git
cd pokemon-showdown
npm install
cp config/config-example.js config/config.js
node pokemon-showdown start --no-security

Pokemon Showdown will be available at http://localhost:8000.

Contributing

This project is currently for scholastic credit. Contributing is welcome, however I will need to record what your contributions are.

Contributions to date

• godpow - PR #2 - added CLI option to have the agent look for battles on the ranked ladder.

License

MIT