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Posted by __cayenne__ 8 hours ago

Show HN: Gemini 4 Argon plays StarCraft(starskirmish.com)
I've refreshed StarSkirmish Bench, a benchmark where LLMs play StarCraft BW by writing code, with results from the flagship models of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Muse
167 points | 74 commentspage 2
aiiotnoodle 6 hours ago|
Would love to see an LLM written bot play Red Alert 2/Red Alert.

I think with the abilities of AI improving, playing games would be a good benchmark as long as they're not trained on them.

m_w_ 7 hours ago||
This is an interesting benchmark - I like that time is limited, as it often isn't in other benchmarks.

It would be interesting to see the reverse, how long does each model take to get >50% WR against bots of various tiers.

__cayenne__ 7 hours ago|
I did a 48 hour live stream - Astra cleared in 43 hours.

Although I should caveat the format advantaged the LLM bots compared to traditional tournament rules.

jstummbillig 7 hours ago||
How do they avoid the LLMs simply working with pre-training data? Which apparently they do, since the human written bots win. But it's a mystery, is what it is.
pelagicAustral 6 hours ago||
This kind of makes me think about making better bots for Counter Strike based on human top level players, which i think its a very undervalued category of software. You can even forget about about CS and name any FPS and you'll be hard pressed to find a game with seriously good bots.
fwip 5 hours ago|
The bots are bad not because it's hard to write a good FPS bot, but because it's not fun to play against ones that are great.
pelagicAustral 4 hours ago||
I think you are thinking about insta-killing machine bots set to detect a head through a wall and shoot it. I am talking about properly trained bots that while playing pretty good are also making mistakes and taking actions that may or maybe not suit the team strategy. A bot with the randomness of a human.
qsort 7 hours ago||
It's beyond insane that Astra achieves above 50%. Are models allowed to "play against" the specific bot they're up against? What explains the fact that it drops to single-digits against strong bots?
__cayenne__ 7 hours ago|
Yes during the 1 hour window they are allowed to play practice matches against opponents they are graded against - though they do not have access to their opponents source code.

They drop to single digits against the A tier and S tier bots because those bots are just generally harder opponents to beat.

tweakimp 6 hours ago||
If you want to see human written bots in action or compete in the bot ladder yourself, try https://aiarena.net (SC2)
donutdonot 6 hours ago||
I assume lots of bot code is part of the training data? So it's basically a version of how will they can improve upon those solutions public out there?
rdudek 6 hours ago||
Does anyone know if there was a project having LLMs play Cities Skylines and see how well it manages to design and build a city?
rafiyashaheen11 6 hours ago||
Oh my gosh! It feels so cool trying this that is played by LLMs. I am sooo eager to try argon 4 and build many robotic projects.
LarsDu88 6 hours ago|
Not played by LLMs. The LLMs write the bots that play the game. They don't play directly. Read the article!
gchamonlive 6 hours ago||

  Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". 
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
LarsDu88 2 hours ago||
whoops, apologies
brap 6 hours ago|
What if we let the agents play directly instead of writing bots?
__cayenne__ 4 hours ago||
I think we want to move beyond code based bots asking the LLMs to try to train a custom neural net, in a limited time + compute, to play StarCraft BW is probably the most promising direction

I am considering an experiment where the task is to try to win by adversarially targeting Pluto (a high profile self play based RL model)

ghostbrainalpha 6 hours ago|||
If you are talking about take a screen shot, analyze move the window a bit, take another screenshot, move the window, repeat until they have seen enough of the map to make a decision, then decide what to click on, issue order.... this could absolutely be done. It's very similar to how LLM's have driven a car on a safe track.

But right now the response time would be so slow that the bot would not be close to competitive except with the most low level players. Especially because its hard to click on things that are moving at the same time as well.

Sometime soon, I'd like to see an LLM be competitive using only computer vision, mouse movement, and locked into a human possible number of actions per minute.

LarsDu88 6 hours ago|||
https://broodbench.com/

TLDR they suck and many default to doing probe rushes.

brap 3 hours ago||
Doesn’t this suggest that the results seen in the OP are merely copying strategies it has seen in other bots (code in the training data), and not actually the agent developing its strategy?
LarsDu88 2 hours ago||
Basically yes, but the space of "AI for RTS and videogames" likely goes well beyond Starcraft, so there's probably a lot of unique programming techniques these frontier models can apply for writing AI bots that haven't been done yet.
devmor 6 hours ago||
Even the most powerful frontier models on SOTA hardware are not fast enough for starcraft, which generally involves multiple informed decisions per second at peak moments.

You can train a specialized model for this, but a frontier model is ill-fitting.

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