showdown VS libmelee

Like last time I will be using this pokemon showdown bot to make this work. The teams have ben fed into it, and two instances of the bot are running. Bot 1 will challenge Bot 2 to a Gen 7 anything goes match on Pokemon Showdown. The replay is then saved to my PC and live commentary is recorded.

I know about the Showdown bot by Pmariglia. In fact I spoke to the creator for more than two hours on discord trying to get it to work, this involved me downloading python, docker, gitbash, all sorts of command prompt tomfoolery.

First a bit of background. While looking for ways to do this I came across this Pokemon Showdown bot, created by Pmariglia. So shout out to them, as this wouldn't have been possible with the work they had already done!

He doesn't reveal any big details about the algorithm, but from what I can tell his final iteration is some kind of expectiminimax + pruning, where essentially the bot is looking forward a few turns and based on all possible (or usually all "reasonable") outcomes, picks the moves that minimize the worst outcome, aka your traditional "safe" player. There are definitely limitations to this approach, first of all is the depth of search. To give context, Stockfish regularly searches to 30 moves ahead. I am pretty sure that a lot of implementations are limited to a mere 3 moves ahead, as illustrated here (https://github.com/pmariglia/showdown/issues/53). So, I suspect that ~1600 is going to be a pretty hard limit because you can't use this approach by itself to really develop long-term strategies. Another thing I wanted to point out is that this algorithm is also really prone to exploitability- knowing that your opponent is always a safe player is going to lead to easy manipulation by the best players. He even mentions it here in his Smogon post:

A quick google has found an AI program that you could use. https://github.com/pmariglia/showdown Now I don't know if this will simply play for you, or allow you to play against it, but either way there'd be a way to do it.

Libmelee (Super Smash Bros. Melee bot library that interfaces with Slippi rollback netplay): altf4/libmelee: Open Python 3 API for making your own Smash Bros: Melee AI that works with Slippi Online (github.com)

I used libmelee to do it. Processing took about 16 hours. It was basically all the replays I've ever played on netplay since it came out.