Top
Best
New

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
174 points | 77 commentspage 3
brap 7 hours ago|
What if we let the agents play directly instead of writing bots?
__cayenne__ 5 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 7 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 7 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.

caughtinthought 7 hours ago||
How do the best humans do against the LLMs?
thinkingtoilet 7 hours ago|
There is currently an AI bot playing on the ladder in Korea and essentially it will nearly always win because it can micro every unit individually across the entire map. If a normal human can max out at hundreds of actions per minute, the bot can do thousands. Broodwar is so insanely difficult mechanically that there is no way for humans to compete. I imagine in a few months, maybe a year, it will be completely unbeatable.
0ddj0b 8 hours ago||
Any thoughts on building this for Starcraft 2?
amishacreates 4 hours ago||
Benchmark vs intelligence which considers more?
xyst 3 hours ago||
No mention of actions per minute? Clearly the best indicator of performance missed in this experiment
dgant 26 minutes ago|
It's trivial to write a bot that maxes out APM by issuing a command to every unit every frame.

Making actually good decisions is the bottleneck.

aleksiy123 5 hours ago||
The site overall looks nice too. It’s fun not to see slop for a ui for this kind of project.
Cynddl 4 hours ago||
Once again, a page with a Pareto curve that is not a Pareto curve. Claude Haiku 5.5 is not on the curve, but inside. Seems like people don't really know what a Pareto curve is.
nozzlegear 4 hours ago||
This thing would beat me, but I'm ass at StarCraft.
brokensegue 7 hours ago||
why protoss?
iammjm 7 hours ago||
Maybe because Protosses have been doing bad lately and need some help improving :) (won only 3 out of 22 ASL championships in the past 10 years)

On a more serious note: all three races play quite differently so it makes sense to focus on just one. And protoss is mechanically the easiest and most straightforward race: fewer but stronger units, a single worker can be used to build multiple buildings at once, versatile basic static defence

__cayenne__ 5 hours ago|||
Protoss has the most mature human written SC BW bot scene right now. If you look on BASIL ladder much of the top 10 are Protoss.

Protoss vs Protoss only also helps downscope the problem given the time constraints

knicholes 3 hours ago|||
I can tell you why NOT Zerg. Zerg you have to do too many actions. Select the hatchery, select larvae, choose which unit to build. That extra select larvae step is a problem.
MadameMinty 7 hours ago|||
for AIur
glouwbug 7 hours ago||
My wife for hire
cdelsolar 6 hours ago||
toss imba
jehykyle 7 hours ago|
[flagged]