I was pretty impressed by the Falcon AI earlier this year. He actually used modern reinforcement learning to train from 0 instead of the crappy built in AI. Also, his AI was limited to near-human reaction time (10 frames) which led to a more human-looking agent.

At the end of the day these papers are from master's students. I think they're both impressive in that context.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.06230.pdf

Interestingly the reason they chose falcon was that he has no projectile attacks. I also remember hearing that it could only play against other falcons, and only on battlefield. But it could have been improved since then

> Falcon AI

which one is that, I hadn't seen it (and its not the one you linked).

"The agent has access to five actions to choose from: do nothing, left dodge, right dodge, standing dodge, and Fox’s shine (essentially a shield that pushes opponents away)."

Possibly classified as left/right dodge?

It requires a shine, jump, and then a left/right dodge executed in a specific time frame, which makes it seem like it was programmed in. My guess is that they just wanted to focus on the deep learning and not get bogged down in Melee mechanics/terminology.

Left/right dodges are the rolls. Wavedashes are a more complex maneuver.

Wave dashing is a combination of actions, not a single action.

It requires jumping though, which isn't listed as an action

Well its a series of actions not a combination.