Brood War Bench

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.

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.

I thought that it was videos of the replays on the site. Was very impressed that it was a replay playing that you can scroll around in and select units.

Fable's effort level is a significant omission, given it was ranked 3rd behind Astra xhigh and Astra medium.

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.

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.

Hmmmmm, almost like these models aren't generally intelligent

Make the OpenAI models develop AI-scripts to play the game instead (like the good old AI-scripts, not AI as in LLMs). They are amazing at that.

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

It was the late 90s, my very first day at a new school, I was asked to introduce myself at the front of the class, I mentioned I like computers, one guy at the back of the class blurts out “En Taro Adun” and without skipping a beat I replied “J’tokoh zohl”, and we instantly became best friends.

This is a very interesting benchmark, and I think it has a lot of potential to make the speed of a model quantifiable.

I'm often asking myself is it better to use higher or lower effort levels, or to maybe drop down to a "dumber" but faster model. And so using a real-time based competition as a benchmark could shed some light on this, I think.

In this vein, here are what I would love to see added in this benchmark:

- Include Google's Gemini models. I keep hearing Gemini being praised for its speed, and I would like to see whether that gives it a big enough edge over the bigger but slower models. - How does a Cerebras-accelerated open source model fare against a much larger but much slower frontier model?

I also feel like in general there is a lot of very low-hanging fruit to start benchmarking models across the spectrum of real-time vs batch-style workloads. Perhaps Brood War sits somewhere quite near the "real-time" end of the spectrum, but what about something like a game of speed chess, or a turn-based game with time limits?

I think what I would like to see the most is for someone to come up with a benchmark that supports tuning the "real-timeliness" of the benchmark, and then running a sweep of a model across the whole spectrum. That could get result in real nice graphs with multiple models on the pareto-frontier, varying based on the hosting provider and the model dimensions.

Check out pluto, RL trained sc bw bot. Somehow it is now going rogue on the Korean ladder and flattening pros. There are some yt games by it, search for ^333^

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