Brood War Bench

Unrelated to the benchmark...

I love StarCraft. I started playing it right from the beginning, most of my friends right now are from that era. I literally met people that have spread to almost every continent when I was in my early teens. We played at internet cafes and did not have access to the internet, that was priced differently...

I miss those days so much.

Everybody was from a different background back then, and nobody was anything other than a guy that plays StaCraft at the cybercafe... And now, we are in our 40's and I know Math teachers, history teachers, oil rig operators, software programmers, professional gamers, lawyers and more... hahah So crazy to think about it... and I know them, we talk, what a world.

Back in 2010, during the early days of bwapi, there was a Brood War AI tournament held by the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz. It's interesting to see how different the approaches were back then, vs this or Deepmind's SC2 work.

https://web.archive.org/web/20091124210529/http://eis.ucsc.e...

There's a great contemporary Ars Technica piece by a competitor:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swar...

As an undergrad I did a project using genetic programming. It was not very successful, but it was a lot of fun.

https://tomisin.space/archive/starcraft-genetic-programming/

I don't know where else to write this, but I want to throw the idea out there. I have long wanted to take old broodwar televised matches, many of which are terrible quality 240p, and use machine learning to convert them to into perfect Broodwar Remastered frames. This seems tractable to me because you should be able to map the terrain sets to their remastered equivalents, and the game is just a series of sprites rendered at specific frames. Even if the source quality is terrible, I imagine this is able to be extracted at high quality since you can, eg, set up an automated pipeline which generates training data. Maps from original graphics to remastered, and then again for 240p -> tilemap positions for frame camera center + sprite positions / animation index.

I love this. Funnily enough StarCraft has influenced how I approach AI at a meta level

Protoss: powerful and expensive frontier coding agents you directly micromanage for the toughest tasks

Terran: versatile team comps of dedicated agent roles you can delegate well-defined tasks to

Zerg: massive swarms of specialist custom agents inside your apps that you evolve and optimise for speed and cost

Knowing every faction has its strengths and weaknesses helps me decide which tools to use for the job.

Your minds will be blown when you realize just how much StarCraft is ingrained into South Korean culture. They literally had (or have) dedicated TV channels just for StarCraft.

Brood War was the first video game to be broadcast on TV in Korea. I'm pretty sure it's still going.

There is currently a bot beating everyone on the ladder. Just watched it today on Artosiscasts yt channel.

This thing kept me sane through university. I had a shitty computer which could barely run this and no Internet so I just played against the computer, which was both frustrating and educational.

I will always love this and now I'm going to play it again. Remastered and on a fancy modern machine.

A friend of mine created GoBench[1][2] that evaluates LLMs on 9×9 Go using KataGo opponents as Elo anchors, you see real capability differences there, like Astra Max substantially leading all other models. I think strategy is a generally interesting area to evaluate LLMs on

[1] https://rolandgao.com/blog/gobench/

[2] https://rolandgao.com/gobench.pdf

No model will ever figure out how to make a ling tight wall.

Openai 5 dots 2, and alpha Star, AI research used to be very fun

I'm trying to play but it says "another match is already active". Can only a single player play on your system at the same time?

EDIT: Nevermind, seems to work now. Watching a local qwen3.8-flash-next play this.

If you want to see human written bots in action or compete in the bot ladder yourself, try https://aiarena.net/

Did it play by looking at screenshots and sending clicks, or was there other mediation/symbolization?

It sounds like it might have been actually played in real time, which would be very important to distinguish.

I have recently seen other harnesses letting agents play real-time games in what seems like discrete time slices, turning eg Portal into something turn-based https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruuGXFAmiOE

*wonders if running startcraft in wasmjs uses less CPU than anubis

This is a great idea for a benchmark. Something all the benchmarks seem to be missing is strategy, tactical solutions in most of the benchmarks are all thats required but here requires actual long term thinking and tactical thinking, balancing and orchestration.

At last something that feels properly orthogonal to pelicans on bicycles.

I think we're on the early days of games you connect with your agent to. Human + AI units one versus the other. Like knights with their horses. Not sure which is the horse..

Would Jev be good for this?

Any details about the harness the agents were given? I am curious what representation of the screen and world state was provided to the agents and what tools they had available.

+ Playable Agent driven Starcraft

+1 because StarCraft

Good example of how these things sometimes spend way too much time thinking to be useful

A ton of conversations about the game must be in the training set. I wonder, is there any way just from watching how they play, of telling if they tend to pick strategies that people complain or meme about online?

working on a similar project for street fighter currently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJYTV3ZiT6o

Wondering what it would look like if you allowed them to write scripts. You could throttle the number of clicks to make it interesting.

Would be interesting if you could team a fast and slow agent together -- slow model can either act directly or maybe just communicate to the fast model.

I would love to create one of these benchmarks for age of empires 2, but I have no idea how to make the AIs play it. Maybe I can get Claude to do it anyway.

Game performance is one of those topics that makes it so abundantly clear how limited these systems still are. StarCraft is predominantly a mechanical game so the horizon of what you need to do is quite short and tactile, and even then without advantages no system has come close to beating a human.

I saw someone recently try to get an agentic system to play Final Fantasy and it did about as well as a Roomba.

I don't normally anthropomorphize the AIs but this is super cute, lol.

Gemini wasn’t included, but I’m guessing its performance would have been similar to Grok’s performance despite having roots in DeepMind.

Somewhat related: In 2018, Google DeepMind had already created AIs that were capable of beating professional gamers in StarCraft 2 (the sequel to Brood War): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs