Even at Burning Man, in the middle of the desert, there is a camp that hosts a StarCraft tournament every year (on the dustiest setups you've ever seen!) :)

Oh boy, I've spent more hours playing it than I dare to admit. I won over 10000 battle.net games ... on just one of my several accounts :) When the SC2 beta came out, I played about 50-100 games and never bought the full game, because I knew it would be like heroin to me, and I was already an adult that had to take care of himself.

Same and Brood War is starting to have a bit of a resurgence. Not anything huge. When Battle.net servers are actually working, tend to play on the ladder a few times a week. Get crushed, but still one of the greatest competitive games ever made.

I agree.

My first time playing StarCraft was at summer camp around a decade after it came out.

All the smartest people played it so I wanted to too. Great decision, I have been continually impressed with the people who StarCraft introduced me to.

My best greetings to all Starcraft Elders clanners of yesteryear :).

Yes! Being young is great, and it always seems like those days were the best.

Later we even listened to Eminem and played violent video games. Most of have never even been charged with a crime, much less abused someone.

A better benchmark might be asking the LLMs to write GO ai and then comparing that-- the issue is that there will be a HUGE difference in performance that depends purely on this game being in the LLM's training... but training a general LLM to directly play these games would be a waste of capacity and shouldn't be encouraged for benchmaxxing sake.

Programming an engine OTOH is a skill that is more general and they should all have.

Might be useful to have the target of the engine be some specific virtual machine that gets a strict cycle budget-- e.g. execution runs so many cycles, and result is read out of a specific memory address at the end (or when it terminates early).

Link to the video for the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vsTqNwHquE . I would note the bot is not APM limited, and comments suggest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vsTqNwHquE&lc=UgxBrY4CkuZx7... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vsTqNwHquE&lc=UgyZ0XVFDqzJT...) it's likely using map hacks, both of which make the bot significantly less impressive.

I've been running these with friends recently, it's very fun. I ran irl bot tournaments for board games a couple times but the agent era opens up a huge amount of possibilities.

Must recently I built out a MMORPG puzzle box thing, I wrote a general game architecture doc but left the specific puzzle design up to Fable. Nobody is actively playing rn but I left it up at bot.willmorrison.net.

There's a bot data stream already; it's probably hooked up to that rather than screencap. Yes, I believe these were playing in real time.

Oh sorry I should be more clear on that. Will add to report.

For agent harness I did Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build. This was primarily a cost driven decision — I have a lot of free tokens and I didn't want to pay API prices for this.

For game harness I used minimal BW-API issue command and get observation apis as tools. I felt this was the most fair way to do it on my small scale.

In the future I would like to integrate code mode and multiple games/I think if it was a best of 5 where each agent could learn from its past games and build its own automations over time that would be much more interesting.

That’s why I tried making https://wrathbench.shard.page

Dibs on the fly brain

At high levels of play Zerg is generally considered significantly stronger than the other races. So I generally will assume AI will tend to pick Zerg

I wonder if there is a library to decipher brood war replay files. Perhaps an agent could learn by watching.

I might open this up to a tournament if enough people want. Any interest?

AlphaStar beat one retired professional by cheating.

AlphaStar won a showmatch against TLO. TLO was never one of the strongest players in the world. He had been retired for over three years by the time of the match. Google set the rule that their system would have human-like mechanics, but it played several times faster than any human, never issued a wasted action, had an inhumanly fast reaction time, issued commands with perfect accuracy using an API, and could see the entire map at once.

It was later released to the open ladder with more human-level mechanics. Even strong amateurs regularly beat it. I have beaten it myself. It was strong, but not even close to the level of the strongest human players. It had obvious and easily-exploitable deficiencies in strategy and building placement.

I think even the cheater version would have lost handily to Serral or any of the strongest players.

(It apparently beat MaNa as well as TLO, but those matches were never released to my knowledge. I see no reason to assume Google cheated less flagrantly in private than they did in public.)

I predict LLMs will reach superhuman level and beat even that model in the next 12 months