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serf • today at 4:17 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

none of these games really require a lot of experimental feedback, the goals are well stated and known; experiments may drive optimization if thats the question.

as far as the on rails comment : there's no good way to know the provenance of an LLM output, but the LLM made bots generally look like very small, modular, sometimes functionalized versions of the human equivalents; the difference being that the LLM is calling the funtions often rather than a conditional loop in a main().

a factorio bot I worked on when Astra was first getting previewed was essentially a directory of very small argument-receiving functional and self-supporting programs that had very limited scope, and an agents.md file that directed the LLM to where such capabilities existed to preempt a directory search every compaction/context-swap.

so you'd have things like "python walk.py N 40" for 40 units of northern travel. a watchdog that waited for HP to drop or movement to become inhibited, etc.

My very first experience with LLM driven bot development in the GPT3 days created huge unmaintainmable monoliths that kind of worked due to TDD but were essentially spaghetti. LLMs have been trending away from those paradigms into small self-encapsulated programs. probably because those are less abusive to ctx count and produce better results since they lose/compact less.


Replies

__cayenne__ • today at 5:34 PM

I would disagree that creating a StarCraft: BW bot doesn't require experimental feedback. The way a human author typically improves their bot is by having it play opponents and A/B test tactics and strategies.

There's also a pretty high profile StarCraft: BW bot right now called Pluto trained exclusively by self play RL (AlphaStar style).